Robert Mailhammer at The Conversation (Phys.org) writes about a study of contact between the early Germanic peoples and the Carthaginian empire:
The presence of the Carthaginians on the Iberian Peninsula is well documented, and it is commonly assumed they had commercial relations with the British Isles. But it is not generally believed they had a permanent physical presence in northern Europe. By studying the origin of key Germanic words and other parts of Germanic languages, Theo Vennemann and I have found traces of such a physical presence, giving us a completely new understanding of the influence of this Semitic superpower in northern Europe.
Identifying traces of Punic in Proto-Germanic languages tell an interesting story. Take the words “shilling” and “penny”: both words are found in Proto-Germanic. The early Germanic people did not have their own coins, but it is likely they knew coins if they had words for them. In antiquity, coins were used in the Mediterranean. One major coin minted in Carthage was the shekel, the current name for currency of Israel. We think this is the historical origin of the word “shilling” because of the specific way the Carthaginians pronounced “shekel,” which is different from how it is pronounced in Hebrew.
The pronunciation of Punic can be reasonably inferred from Greek and Latin spellings, as the sounds of Greek and Latin letters are well known. Punic placed a strong emphasis on the second syllable of shekel and had a plain “s” at the beginning, instead of the “esh” sound in Hebrew.
But to speakers of Proto-Germanic—who normally put the emphasis on the first syllable of words—it would have sounded like “skel.” This is exactly how the crucial first part of the word “shilling” is constructed. The second part, “-(l)ing,” is undoubtedly Germanic. It was added to express an individuating meaning, as in Old German silbarling, literally “piece of silver.” […] Similarly, our word “penny” derives from the Punic word for “face,” panē. Punic coins were minted with the face of the goddess Tanit, so we believe panē would have been a likely name for a Carthaginian coin. […]
One area of Carthage leadership was agricultural technology. Our work traces the word “plow” back to a Punic verb root meaning “divide.” Importantly, “plow” was used by Proto-Germanic speakers to refer to a more advanced type of plow than the old scratch plow, or ard. […] The Old Germanic and Old English words for the nobility, for example æþele, are also most likely Punic loanwords. We found Punic also strongly influenced the grammar of early Germanic, Germanic mythology and the Runic alphabet used in inscriptions in Germanic languages, until the Middle Ages.
I grew more and more skeptical as I read, but it’s interesting stuff, and I’ll be interested to see what people say. Thanks, Dmitry!
Update. David Marjanović cites this post by “The Linguistic Physicist,” which begins:
Vennemann’s at it again and with no more evidence than the last time. It’s overblown surface level similarities with no real evidence.
There’s very little evidence of Punic accentuation, but certainly none to demonstrate that Punic lost or reduced the first vowel in šeqel (in fact, Punic seems to have preserved the first vowel in the plural of segolates, whilst Hebrew lost it, i.e. Punic had šiqelim where Hebrew has šqalim). The evidence that Punic had merged š into s before their domination by the Romans is also lacking (although the literature does frequently claim such a merger). Early Phoenician and Punic inscriptions are pretty consistent with which words they spell with s and which š suggesting the distinction was still present, they just don’t always agree with Hebrew […]
And summarizes thus: “It’s nonsense built on nonsense.” Pretty devastating.
I really must publish on Scandi-Congo.
Before I even clicked through I thought to myself “this sounds like one of those theories that what’s-his-name has. You know, um, that guy.” Took me a little bit before I reconstructed who that guy was, viz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Vennemann. Then I clicked through.
Dwds traces pflücken to a late Latin *piluccare “einer Iterativbildung zu spätlat. *pilūcāre ‘aus-, ablesen’ (woraus aprov. pelugar ‘ausklauben, rupfen’), das von lat. pilāre ‘enthaaren’ (zu lat. pilus ‘Haar’) abgeleitet ist.” I do not really understand why plow cannot be derived from the same or a related source with reference to the “bald” aspect of a plowed field.
I liked the comparison of the first four letters of the Punic abjad and the futhark (if you leave one out from one of them). The shapes are very similar indeed, you just have to ignore the totally different values and the well-documented development of the Greek and Roman alphabets that led to the runes. I think there’s also a gap of a few hundred years to bridge.
But if the claim is just that the futhark was ordered to make it look like a North Semitic abjad, it does make you go hmm. As far as I know there is no other theory about why that order was used.
I found the link at the bottom of the article more interesting: A 2017 story summarizing Iversen and Kroonen on a possible Funnel Beaker (Yamnaya? Old European?) substrate in Proto-Germanic, but it’s still paywalled.
Mailhammer
What sort of a moniker is that? Google/wp seems to know only this dude.
Is it derived from hammering (chain)mail? (Chain) mail is Latinate; hammer is Germanic; did the Carthaginians bring metalworking northwards as well?
Took me a little bit before I reconstructed who that guy was, viz.,
Ah, I see what you mean. It’s Edo Nyland in disguise.
Edit: (before Hat accuses me of merely sneering): I’m not saying he’s wrong; neither am I saying he’s right; just that this is no more falsifiable than the Faculty of Language or Merge.
Well I for one had been wondering why German had such an unusually rich lexical stock (compared to its geographical neightbours) for describing the manoeuvres of battle elephants, so this is certainly timely
German had such an unusually rich lexical stock (compared to its geographical neightbours) for describing the manoeuvres of battle elephants
Care to elaborate? 🙂
Or is this tongue in cheek! 😀
That’s completely irrelevant to Germanic, which had no distinction between these until Old English developed one.
I must say this seems to work better than the traditional derivation from “shield”, which doesn’t explain, as far as I’ve noticed, where the *d went.
Works beautifully as far as I understand, but I’ve also read somewhere that the plough-as-opposed-to-ard is an Early Medieval innovation that spread, with the word, from Slavic. Unfortunately there were no details about the Slavic side.
I haven’t read this article yet, but in Vennemann’s own work (on academia.edu) all I’ve seen is the idea that SVO is VSO with the subject fronted for emphasis. Fair enough, but SVO is also all over Romance (notably unlike Latin), and it’s the default in Slavic…
That would be the only case in all of West Germanic where *i…u, as opposed to *u…i, underwent umlaut. Unless of course we take the unattested *piluccare and assume an even more unattested spontaneous metathesis to *puliccare… not impossible by any means, but.
Seconded.
Probably folk etymology of -hamer, from a place name in -ham (Bavarian for Heim and very common). On the Mail- part I’m out of suggestions, though, beyond Meile “mile” which isn’t terribly convincing.
That part is completely reasonable: agriculture arrived in Europe in a massive immigration from Anatolia, which can be expected to have spread a single language family all over the place; the most parsimonious assumption is that Basque is the last remnant of that, and indeed the agricultural vocabulary of Basque is not IE (…but instead looks cognate to those of Caucasian and Burushaski). In other words, the closest living relative of whatever was spoken in the Funnel Beaker culture is most likely Basque.
Where Vennemann runs into trouble is his implicit assumption that Basque has changed extremely little in the last several thousand years so that hydronyms and other words all over Europe can be explained from basically the modern language.
Haribo delenda est?
I was reading at the weekend about an elephant which Charlemagne took with him to a war against the Danes, which died in what is now Germany on the way…
Big chunks of the book this article previews, The Carthaginian North, the Semitic influence on early Germanic, are in google books.:
https://books.google.com/books?id=iDG2DwAAQBAJ
I’d have guessed aethele and Latin aedile were cognates. I see that’s not accepted. Is it implausible? Aedile is said to go back to P. It. “aeth” = fireplace related to OE ad and OHG eit = pyre. I don’t know the sound change laws. Do they not allow aethele from a root that could also give ad and eit, so that aethele would be a hearth-official or keeper of a sacred flame?
tongue in cheek — it’s Des, his cheeks are well developed.
Getting bored in Corona times, are we, Des? You seem to be popping in at magnitudes over your recent once-a-year rate. You’ll be updating dairyland next, I shouldn’t wonder.
I usually see shilling derived from *skiljanaⁿ, not *skelduz, Modern Danish has the concept of skillemønt = ‘change,’ small denominations to make up a difference, forskel (Sw skillnad) — but in the 10th the shilling was the largest coin minted, so that’s probably not relevant to the etymology no matter how attractive it is to a Dane.
So can anybody get at the Iversen and Kroonen and see if their substratal plant names look Basque?
Des is on Twitter, most days.
before Hat accuses me of merely sneering
Oh, I have no objection whatever to your sneering at Theo Vennemann or Edo Nyland!
Des is on Twitter, most days.
You know who else is on Twitter, most days? Come back to the real world, Des!
Does Twitter do RSS feeds?
I have a review of the book this is based on that should be appearing at some point. It’s very interesting, but the overall thesis is not convincing — to the point that, given that this is the refinement of decades of research by Vennemann coupled with the considerable linguistic expertise of Mailhammer, and so about the ‘best case’ argument we could reasonably expect, I’m happy to firmly rule out any meaningful Punic influence on Germanic fairly definitively. Which is kind of a shame, really — I think this would have been rather a cool thing to be true.
I must say this seems to work better than the traditional derivation from “shield”, which doesn’t explain, as far as I’ve noticed, where the *d went.
I’m not sure I particularly believe the ‘shield’ etymology, but in terms of strict phonological development that’s not an issue — there’s a regular assimilation of *dl (as it was post-Verner) to *ll, the traditional example of which is stall nearly = stabulum (and Middle Welsh ystadl) *skillinga-, granting that preform.
Of course, there’s the question of the *l in the suffix in the first place, but Mailhammer & Vennemann’s own explanation for the double *ll is itself not really watertight. In this piece, Mailhammer seems to just assume a suffix *-ling-, but in the book they explicitly reject this in favour of gemination to close a light open syllable — which is conceivable, but not paralleled in Germanic (*kuningaz ‘king’, etc.), and so a bit ad hoc.
On the whole, derivation directly from the root *skel- ‘split, divide’ seems better. The idea of a coin as a ‘piece’ is a standard semantic origin for currency, and might be helped along by the widespread use of hack silver among early Germanic speakers. The *ll is still a problem though, and one I don’t have a perfect answer for. A suffix *-linga- or *-ninga- would do the trick formally, but that’s only pushing the issue into the derivational morphology.
Thanks, that all sounds reasonable.
Oh yes, I forgot. And I should have mentioned that I only know -ling (somewhat productive in modern German) as a much later reanalysis of -ing.
Yes; Germanic *a and Latin ae are not compatible (you’d expect Germanic *ai > Old English ā), Germanic *þ [θ] aren’t compatible either (you’d expect Germanic *d or *t).
You know who else is on Twitter, most days?
Des wants him to relocate to the Low Countries; something about cloud cover, skin cancer and prince of Orange. The late and former keiser would be a precedent for the president.
America first – the Netherlands second.
Five ways to get Twitter feeds as RSS. I haven’t tried any of them.
The beginning of this piece by Nailhammer reminds me of the Oxford Professor of Ancient History Josephine Quinn’s book, In Search of the Phoenicians, and a damned good book it is:
More here:
https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/all-at-sea-the-maritime-lives-of-the-ancient-phoenicians
and it’s available from Amazon at the very reasonable price of £9.99 or something like that, in hardback.
I see what you did there. 🙂
@David Marjanović: While Woody Guthrie was not so much known for his wordplay, he did have this one number, which I just love the end of:
And I should have mentioned that I only know -ling (somewhat productive in modern German) as a much later reanalysis of -ing.
Indeed. The usual view is that -ling often incorporated the diminutive *-l- as well, especially given the typical semantics of -ling later on. This would work rather nicely for shilling semantically, except that this reanalysis seems to be wholly post-Proto-Germanic. There are a few other words that might be early formations (Gothic gadiliggs ‘cousin’, OHG gatiling ‘relative’, etc., is the only option with a Gothic cognate), but a really productive -ling only seems to be extracted rather later. So either shilling is one of the very earliest examples of derivation of this type, or it has a different etymology.
Or, I suppose, it could be a late-ish formation that spread around. In Gothic, it’s only found in the Naples and Arezzo deeds, which only date from the middle of the 6th c. I wonder if this could have been coined (heh) after Proto-Germanic, and spread with the adoption of more systematic coinage technology (or with the popularity of some particular type or view of currency) between differentiating languages and dialects. Gothic otherwise uses skatts for units of currency. It’s only a vague possibility, but it would at least allow the word to be much younger (probably as young as the 5th c., if we wanted), and so make the presence of a -ling suffix less problematic.
Looking at Casaretto, I’m also reminded that when we do find it, -ling seems very distinctly denominal in earlier Germanic. So that would be an objection to derivation straight from the root *skel-. Maybe we could propose some sort of (later completely lost) nominal derivative as an intermediate step: *√skel- ‘split’ -> *skel-laz ‘??divided thing, chunk’ (perhaps *skell-ingaz ‘piece’, or the like. This could also be a way to smuggle in the second *l without needing such an early *-ling- suffix.
Difficult word, anyway.
Interesting.
I wonder if the amount of loans from West to East Germanic, which is of course generally difficult to investigate, has been underestimated.
The example that comes to mind is… there’s the argument that word-initial *g was [ɣ] in Proto-Germanic because the word “Greek”, plausibly a very early loan from Latin, has a *k throughout the Old Germanic languages (and still in Middle High German). But the vowel in that word is *ē₂, which most likely didn’t exist, but is a Northwest Germanic innovation (not counting “here”, whose [eː] was an allophone of *i in PGmc: Hill 2017). So maybe it’s a loan from Latin into West Germanic, and from there into North and East Germanic…
An additional consideration for PGmc *[ɣ-] is that this must have been the sound-value at least in some West Germanic dialects (clearest in Dutch, of course, but usually also assumed for early OE and OFris. where we get early palatalization of ‘*g’ to what eventually becomes [j]: plausibly, though not certainly, *ɣ > ʝ > j). This could of course be a secondary development instead.
Interesting idea on Krekos.
Btw, I should be more careful about checking my posts while they’re still editable. I meant to say that the hypothetical *skellaz could potentially be from *skel-no-, since *no was used to form similar derivatives in PGmc (e.g. OE swefn ‘dream’ and cognates), but I suppose my use of an angled bracket to show derivation made this get taken as code and eaten.
There are several known derivations from the *skelH- root. What would it take for the “shell” word (< *skal-jo-) to work? Two rounds of umlaut and a derivation with -ling? It was borrowed into Italian as scaglia “chip”, says EtymOnline. This would support the semantics but make the timing of the sound changes very difficult.
Back to the original post. How can he say that Germanic speakers would treat a final-stress she’kel as **skel-? If borrowed directly from Carthaginian, it must have happened before Germanic got fixed initial stress, and maybe before both Grimm and Verner — or at least when they were synchronic processes. Both syllables should be preserved, and the unstressed *e would become *i. That would yield something like Late PGmc **si[ɣ]él, immune to the loss of unstressed schwa.
I was going to suggest that without any archaeological evidence of Phoenician presence in Northern Europe, any Semitic borrowing in Germanic should be assumed to be a Wanderwort. It’s not unreasonable to think that it the coin was known as **skel in Central Europe, it would have been identified with the root *skel by Germanic speakers. The most likely mediators of both Wörter and Sachen from the Phoenician sphere to Early Iron Age Germania would have been the Celts of Gaul, or maybe the Ligurians. What would that do to the word?
Umlaut won’t work, both because this wouldn’t be a factor in Gothic at all (unless the borrowing idea actually is right after all), and because *a won’t umlaut up to -i-. There could be a root connection, but the stem formations must be different.
M&V’s idea is that the *ə was simply elided out by Germanic speakers, who took a sequence *səqél, and interpreted it as /skel/ in their own phonology. If we grant everything else, I think this is reasonable enough for the post-Verner period. By that time, Germanic would not have had a /ə/ in the phonology, and would be used to aligning stress with root initial position.
(A pre-Verner *səqél would probably have come out as ˣsakil-. A pre-Grimm *səqél- would have become *saɣil-. Or *sakel, *saɣel- if you don’t believe in the raising of unstressed *e. Inherited schwas were retained until sometime after the fixing of intial stress, at which point they either became *a under stress, or disappeared — *ph₂tḗr > *fəþḗr [never ˣfaþḗr, though you can find this anachronistic form in handbooks] > *fádēr; probably pre-PGmc *sokʷ-ə-tó- ‘said’ > *soxəþó- > PGmc *sagda-.)
Absolutely. My point is that I can’t tell if that was an innovation of Proto-West Germanic, or goes all the way down to Proto-Germanic as Moulton thought.
I always write < and >.
Last time I checked, Vennemann assumed Punic influence on Germanic before, during and after Grimm (not sure about Verner).
Oh, awesome. That seems like it explains a number of things…!
Re celtic borrowing:
PIE *skey is attested in Proto-Celtic with identical reflex. The modern Irish word sciollán means “flake”, and the án is only a suffix. There is also scealpa, but this looks to me like a borrowing from Latin. Proto-celtic reconstructions I have seen do not have ll for words like coill “forest” and mall “slow” but I would have to check more of these. Old Irish did have ll, as it did for Latin borrowings like cella > cill.
early OE and OFris. where we get early palatalization of ‘*g’ to what eventually becomes [j]
Oh, here’s where I can ask this! In the first line of Beowulf,
I’ve heard an argument that at the time of composition, gear must have been pronounced with an initial [g] in order to alliterate with gar. (Or alternately, both pronounced with [ɣ]?) But when I go to listen to various recordings of Beowulf, everybody seems to pronounce gear with initial [j]. And Wiktionary derives it “from Proto-West Germanic *jār, from Proto-Germanic *jērą (“year”), from Proto-Indo-European *yōro-, *yeh₁ro- (“year, spring”), *yeh₁-”. So is the alliteration argument wrong? Was the Dena/dagum alliteration sufficient, and the g-alliteration unnecessary? Or are [g] and [j] considered close enough for alliteration?
Old English had two allophones of initial *g, probably (at least in early OE) [ɣ] and [ʝ], though at some point the latter became [j]. There was also a phoneme [j]. All three could alliterate with one another — the first two, because of their phonemic relation; the latter two, because of their phonetic similarity (or perhaps identity), and the first and last (as here: ɣɑ:r — jɑ:r) because of the bridge provided by the middle one as part of the poetic conventions.
Thank you, that makes it clear! So the [g] pronunciation of gear is wrong. And just to see how common this alliteration is, I opened Beowulf to a random page and saw an example with all three:
where if I understand correctly, gyfen (< PGmc *gebaną) and geongum (< PGmc *jungaz) would be pronounced with [j] and gold (< PGmc *gulþą) with [g], assuming Beowulf is after “some point”.
And I’m surprised to see “champion” in there, since it’s from French, but I guess English was not completely airtight against French before 1066!
D’oh, sorry, that’s not “champion” from French, it’s cempa, a doublet, borrowed into Proto-West Germanic from Latin. Its Modern English descendant would be kemp if it had survived. PGmc has way more Latin in it than I thought.
Chemp?
No, kemp is indeed right — palatalization in Old English took place before umlaut, and this was from earlier *kampijōn- > *kampjan- (or the like). It’s the same lack of palatalization as in unkempt (related to comb) or the place-name Kent.
Its Modern English descendant would be kemp if it had survived.
As it has, of course, in the surnames of all the people, some of them still alive, named Kemp and Kempe. William Kempe was a profit-sharer in the theatre company known as “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men” along with Will Shakespeare, but he left the company around the time the Globe was built. He is best known for his “Nine Days’ Wonder”, in which he morris-danced from London to Norwich in nine days (spread out over several weeks, to be sure).
Da/Sw kæmpe/kämpe = ‘fighter’ and in Danish now = ‘giant’ and general intensifier via ‘strong fighter’. Listed as a loan from OE into ON, for a change.
Also the network load balancer at work is a KEMP appliance from Kemp Inc, but I haven’t found who or what it would be named for. It could be a person or maybe somebody snuck in an allusion to Beowulf, in either case it seems to have been written out of corporate history.
Norwegian too (kjempe), also as an intensifier. I think the intensifier was generalized from kjempestor “giant big” and kjempesterk “strong as a giant/champion”. The relation to fighting isn’t completely lost — there’s a word slåsskjempe “person fond of fighting/prone to getting into fights”. I think I’ve told before that it’s one of those loanwords that can be both masculine and feminine in the dialects in spite of having a prototypically male (not to say masculine) referent. I’ve wondered if that goes back to the Lat. ending -ion.
Punic placed a strong emphasis on the second syllable of shekel
Wait, what? How could that possibly be known? In Hebrew it bears (and always has borne, as far as I can make out) initial stress.
Was the Dena/dagum alliteration sufficient, and the g-alliteration unnecessary?
No. The way OE alliterative verse works is that the third stressed syllable sets the alliteration pattern: the first or the second stress or both must alliterate with it, the fourth stress does not. Which is why Richard Wilbur’s “Junk” epically fails as alliterative verse for all its alliteration. It quotes two and a half lines from Waldere:
The first line is a 2-3 alliteration on /w/, the second a 1-3 alliteration on /m/, and the third is going to be a 1-2-3 alliteraton on /h/, even though the second half of the line is not given by Wilbur. Weland is the smith of the Aesir, Mimming a named sword. See Laudator Temporis Acti on this bit.
But alas! Look at Wilbur’s own lines:
He alliterates on a vowel, /h/, /f/, /ʃ/, /p/, /ʃ/, /n/ — but his Reimgeber is the fourth rather than the third syllable, with the exception of the penultimate line! What is more, triple alliteration is normally a special effect: it is not to be drummed into the audience’s head like this. “Such epithets, like pepper / Give zest to what you write / And if you strew them sparely / They whet the appetite / But if you lay them on too thick / You spoil the matter quite!”
Tolkien, of course, knew exactly how to do it:
with alliterations on /d/, /s/), /h/, /d/, and /l/. This one does have a lot of triple alliterations, but it’s short and a minstrel’s showpiece. His translation of Sir Gawain has 2532 lines of which 2027 are proper alliterative lines, and not always the same alliterations as in the original. Take the first two lines:
Tolkien’s equivalents have the same alliteration in the first line, but are completely different in the second:
where the loss of burgh/borough in the sense ‘fortified place’ and brit(tened) ‘broken into pieces, shattered, demolished’ has forced Tolkien to find all-new words. He has, however, preserved the grace-note (of no metrical significance, but noticeable and an especial feature of Sir Gawain) that one of the unstressed syllables also alliterates: borȝ is replaced by its quasi-equivalent fell.
English was not completely airtight against French before 1066
By no means. A few such late-OE words that may be from pre-OF are castle, clerk, mantle, purse, trail, turn. Etymological dictionaries tend not to mention French in this connection, just saying “Vulgar Latin”, but they have a more Frenchy flavor than most of the direct Latin borrowings, not to mention a different subject matter for the most part.
Kämpe is found as an archaism in very literary/poetic German.
Kent used to be Cantium.
At least West Germanic does.
The way OE alliterative verse works is that the third stressed syllable sets the alliteration pattern
This is a common description, but not really true linguistically (and I do not believe true metrically, though views differ on this issue). The most accurate way of putting it is that the first primary-stressed syllables in each half-line must alliterate with one another. The first line of Beowulf only has two primary stresses (gār- and ġeār-), and the hūru of Waldere is not stressed (or at least not enough to count for metrical purposes). These are rounded out with a secondary stress in each half-line (which in this case bear ornamental secondary alliteration and d-), but this is not necessary and plenty of lines only have a single potentially alliterating stress. Others have up to three primary stresses, or up to four primary-plus-secondary stresses (though the four-stress lines always involve stress clashes). The idea of a four-stress line is broadly true in the average, but very frequently untrue in detail, and at least very plausibly epiphenomenal as far as metrical structure goes (though again, this is a point of debate).
There’s still good reason to believe that the first stress of the second half-line was compositionally key, the hǫfuðstafr in Norse terminology. It’s just that this isn’t necessarily the third stress in the line as a whole. And double- and triple-alliteration in the second half-line is strictly prohibited in Old English (Middle English poets are often a bit more willing to violate this principle).
@ng, jc
I think better with examples
1 Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard,
2 metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc,
3 uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihwaes,
4 ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ
5 hē ǣrist scōp aelda barnum
6 heben til hrōfe, hāleg scepen.
7 Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard,
8 eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ
9 firum foldu, Frēa allmectig
1 h (4th stress, 1st after caesura)
2 m (3rd stress, 1st after caesura)
3 uu (as 2)
4-5 (interpolation – because original too pagan?)
6 h (as 2)
7 m (as 2)
8 as 4-5
9 f (as 2)
Both nū and scylun are metrically unstressed, so the first line is a typical illustration of the ‘first stress in each half-line’ rule: nū scylun HERġan || HEfanrīċaes UARD (all main stresses are capitalized; -rī- bore secondary stress). (This kind of rhythm, where only a final trochaic word is stressed and alliterating, is called type A3 in the taxonomy devised by Eduard Sievers, and is only possible in the first half-line of a verse.)
Lines 4, 5, and 8 all have vocalic alliteration: Ēċi DRCtin || ŌR ā-STElidae; hē Ǣrist SCŌP || AELda BARnum; Ēċi DRYCtin || ÆFter TIAdæ. I can’t see any reason to think these lines are interpolations. That all vowels alliterate with all other vowels is a general rule of alliterative verse. One reasonable idea is that vowel-initial words really began with an allophonic glottal stop, so that we’d have, for instance:
ˈʔeːcɪː ˈdryxtɪn ˈʔoːr ʔɑːˈstelɪdæː
(Note that ā- in āstelidae is invisible to the alliteration since it’s unstressed — otherwise we’d have illegal double alliteration in the second half-line.)
We happily find this rule applied to names from Christian tradition:
þā wæs Ēve || Ādames brȳd (Genesis A 186)
The basic rules of Old English alliteration are these:
1) The first stressed syllable in each half-line must take part in the alliteration.
2) More syllables can (and sometimes must) take part in the alliteration in the first half-line.
3) No other syllables may take part in the alliteration in the second half-line.
4) Only stressed syllables count for alliteration; un- and weakly stressed syllable are invisible.
5) Alliteration usually involves only the first consonant of the stressed syllable in question (this goes even for things like hn-, hr-, etc. which some have been tempted to take as digraphs for single consonants — these just alliterate as h-, so that heben til hrōfe has double alliteration).
6) The clusters sp-, st-, and sc- (later becoming a fricative [ʃ]) are exceptions, and count as distinct units for alliteration.
7) /j/ counts as alliterating, as a special licence, with [ɣ] and [ʝ].
8) All vowels alliterate with all other vowels.
The only thing this leaves out is exactly when double alliteration is mandatory in the first half-line (basically the details of rule 2), since this depends on specific issues of rhythm and word-structure. This is also all basically true for Old English and Old Saxon verse, and for the few fragments of Old High German alliterative poetry that have survived, with minor adjustments (e.g. substitute sk for sc; rule 7 does not hold for Old High German, and is not relevant for Norse where all apparent initial j‘s are rather the first elements of rising diphthongs).
If anyone wants to know more, there’s a very good book on the subject: https://books.google.be/books/about/Old_English_Metre.html?id=ml2c1X1VS9IC
It doesn’t get into all the controversial questions of metrical theory (hardly a word on the word-foot theory, for instance), but it’s very good as a descriptive overview and introduction to most of the important issues.
Wow, thanks!
Thanks for the detailed precisions; I was writing in haste, as is too common in my corona-era life, and just trying to get the basics down.
I would point out that English has always had a huuuuge tolerance for mucking with the syllable counts, even in what appears to be foot-verse: the “unstressed syllables don’t count” has carried through even into Romance-ified pre-20C Modern English verse. In Sayers’s translation of Dante, we get the line “Then the terror of alighting seemed worse than the terror of soaring”, which has only five stresses but 12 unstressed syllables instead of four, five, or six, given the iambic pentameter context. On the othe hand, stress demotion is a big feature too, as in Pope’s well-known lines: “When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw /The line too labours, and the words move slow”, where the meter has deprived vast and move of their normal status as stressed monosyllables. (In performance, I slow down on these lines, and then go uptempo with “Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain / Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main” before returning to normal tempo.) Still more demotion, of course, appears in Pope’s demonstration of crappy iambic pentameter: “And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.”
ek hleu̯aɣastiʝ holtii̯aʝ | hornã tau̯iðo
Deyr fé | deyja frændr
Deyr sjalfr | it sami
Ek veit einn | att aldregi deyr
Dómr of | dauðan hvern
I suppose it’s also possible that, because it was unstressed, it didn’t begin with [ʔ]. In the northern half of German today, [ʔ] is not inserted before vowel-initial words, but before vowel-initial stressed syllables: [ˈʔ]Astero[ˈʔ]iden und Ko[ˈ]meten.
The first 5 pages of this pdf of a conference handout contain a neat description of the situation in Old English, and what became of it in Middle English: [ʔ] was mostly lost, and poets started using word-final consonants for alliteration if the following word began with a vowel.
(In southern German, [ʔ] is inserted only before vowel-initial utterances; it’s a postpausal voice onset. Unlike in French or some Englishes, it’s obligatory in this last position, though.)
Or quite possibly still:
ek xlewaɣɑstiz xoltijaz xornã tawiðoː
The length of the final vowel is pretty likely still. The exact chronology of the weakening of initial *x and the beginnings of palatalization/rhoticization of *z are unclear. I’m inclined to think by the 5th century the sound had developed to something beyond *z, while *x might still be realized as such, but it’s awfully hard to be sure of the details.
Hávamál is probably old (or at least made of old parts — I can’t imagine it was transmitted in anything like its Frankenstein’s-monster-esque final form in an oral tradition), and that famous stanza is echoed in the Hákonarmál, in a way that’s pretty clearly adapting well-known words, so we’re probably looking at the late Viking Age at least for these lines. Here’s an impression of what that might have sounded like at that time (using ʀ for the outcome of *z that was widely perceived as /r/ by non-Norse speakers, but was distinct from etymological *r):
døyʀ feː døyjɑ̃ friændʀ
døyʀ si̯ɑlvʀ hɪt sɑmɑ
ek wæit æinn ɑt ɑldræiɣɪ døyʀ
doːmʀ ʊ̃v dɑuðɑn xʷern
One of the nice things about alliterative verse is that the alliterations, at least, tended to survive the kinds of sound changes during these periods pretty well. Some exceptions with cluster simplifications, but a lot of this poetry can be appreciated in its manuscript form reasonably well (or even in modern Icelandic), though in some cases the overall phonology will have changed a bit between the probable dates of composition and the creation of the surviving MSS.
The caesuras in the odd lines are not at all clear — maybe a minor point, but possibly important for the overall structure of this verse type. This is ljóðaháttr, which has a normal-ish set of paired half-lines, followed by a ‘full verse’, which is less long than a typical line, but longer than most half-lines. This has internal alliteration, but its internal breaks may not be the same — in my view, full-verses are more akin to half-lines than to lines (they are similar in some important ways to Old English hypermetric lines, though there are important differences). Insofar as there is an internal boundary, I’d put it before sjalfr rather than after (among other things, the run of unstressed syllables in the initial upbeat can be expanded fairly significantly, while unstressed syllables between the two alliterating peaks are much more strictly regulated).
Possibly more representative of the style of the earliest Germanic verse would be something like Atlakviða:
Eldi gaf hon þá alla, er inni vóro (vocalic)
ok frá morði þeira Gunnars komnnir vóro ór Myrkheimi; (M)
forn timbr fello, fiarghús ruko, (F)
bœr Buðlunga, brunno ok skialdmeyiar (B)
inni, aldrstamar, hnigo í eld heitan. (vocalic; the double H in the second half-line is artistic flourish)
Or, with the same late-Viking-Period facelift (though it’s really hard to know if the poem is in fact actually that old):
ʔældɪ ɣɑf hʊn θɑː ʔɑllɑ, eʀ ʔinnɪ woːʀʊ̃
ok frɑ̃ː morðɪ θæiʀɑ ɣunnɑrs komnɪʀ woːʀʊ̃ oːʀ myrkhæimɪ
forn timbr fellʊ̃ fi̯ɑrɣhuːs rukʊ̃
bœːʀ buðlʊŋgɑ brunnʊ̃ ok ski̯ɑldmøyjɑʀ
ʔinnɪ, ʔɑldrstɑmɑʀ hniɣʊ̃ ĩː ʔæld hæitɑn
(Possibly some mistakes there — did this fairly quickly.)
I suppose it’s also possible that, because it was unstressed, it didn’t begin with [ʔ].
Oh, absolutely. There’s a lot we don’t know, or don’t know very confidently, about glottal stops in earlier Germanic.
In this case, just to be clear (though I don’t think you were suggesting otherwise), that’s not an issue for alliteration. Other prefixes such as be- and for- show the same behaviour and are invisible to alliteration as unstressed verbal prefixes.
Thanks for the link to Ricardo’s handout — his work on these things is always worth reading!
What is the difference between {j} in døyjɑ̃ and {i̯} in si̯ɑlvʀ?
The thing about carrying over consonants to vowel-initial words reminds me of the underreported phenomenon of enlace in Spanish — संधि by another word; even the compendious WP article on Spanish phonology gives it only passing mention and links to the only page on the Internet with an explanation. (At least that’s the page where I always end up if I try looking for more details). Regardlessly it’s the feature of spoken Spanish that most trips me up.
It’s phonological: /j/ is a consonantal phoneme, ‘i̯’ only occurs as the first element of what were rising diphthongs in later Norse. Exactly how this played out in real pronunciations at various times is a bit difficult to know. Certainly the diphthongs continued to alliterate as vowels, so jǫrð alliterates as a vowel, not as a consonant /j/ (which would only be from rising diphthongs anyway, since Germanic initial *j was lost in North Germanic in general). It’s possible that phonetically i̯ and j are indeed exactly the same (with the former preceded by glottal stops when fully initial), but it’s also possible that the dynamic movement in the diphthong made for a realization of the initial element that was noticeably different from /j/. Hard to say.
Agolle Kusaal has a contrast between word-initial /j/ (ya “houses”) and /i̯/ (ia “seek”) which I think is realised by /j/ being both tenser and shorter in duration. The /i̯a/ actually patterns like a short monophthong (which is what corresponds to it in the Toende dialect) and I did myself play at one stage with the idea that the contrast was /ja/ versus /ʔja/, but that proved very difficult to make work consistently; there was no other reason to posit a contrastive /ʔ/ word-initially, and no real phonetic support for it anyway.
Romanian has a similar initial /j/ ~ /i̯/ contrast. Interestingly, neither Agolle Kusaal nor Romanian has a contrast of initial /w/ ~ /u̯/; I came across a paper which stated that this is cross-linguistically usual, as there isn’t the phonological leeway there at the back of the mouth to maintain a similar contrast easily.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-phonetic-association/article/perceptionproduction-study-of-romanian-diphthongs-and-glidevowel-sequences/34DA8C53AB136EF748B5471096C79F9A
Better link:
http://www.clillac-arp.univ-paris-diderot.fr/_media/user/ioana_chitoran/pdf/chitoran_jipa02.pdf
(In my 7:56 comment I shouldn’t have said initial contrasts in Romanian; I was falling into a Kusaal-centric viewpoint, where there are no word-internal /Cj/ consonant clusters in any case, so the issue of contrast only arises word-initially. Not so in Romanian.)
Kusaal-centricity is a long and honored tradition in these parts.
संधि by another word
I can’t read Devanagari for beans, but context told me that was a (harmlessly) exoticized version of sandhi. Nevertheless, I ran GT over it, which told me it was Hindi and meant ‘the treaty’, which is indeed one of its Skt meanings. Apparently it is a cultismo.
the only page on the Internet with an explanation
Fortunately, that page links to a page on enchaînement in French, about which there is a good deal more available. It is clearly the same process, which probably means it is of at least Proto-Romance age and possibly goes back to Classical Latin or even earlier.
English is another story, though. One of Wikt.en’s definitions of this word is resyllabification, and that led me to this paper, which studies the intelligibility of resyllabified words like my by *kizz for my bike is. It takes longer for anglophones to understand the resyllabified version than the original, and indeed phonetically the unexploded [k̚] at the end of bike is very different from the aspirated [kʰ] at the beginning of *kizz. (The effect disappears when the words are nonsense in the first place.)
I have always thought that structuralist (small-s) phonology was correct to talk about a “juncture phoneme” in English, something that generative phonology discarded but has not really replaced. There really is a phonemic difference between nitrate /naitrate/, night rate /nait+rait/, and the Nye trait of pottery, something better known to linguists (of a certain age) than to archaeologists, it seems.
I have always thought that structuralist (small-s) phonology was correct to talk about a “juncture phoneme” in English
Definitely, and not just in English. I think you always can avoid setting up juncture phonemes with sufficient ingenuity; but why should you, when they often lead to a much simpler and clearer description? (I suppose that if you’re committed to linguistic subPlatonic realism, as some people are, it’s not so simple.)
That’s the main subject of the same handout I linked to, actually. Basically you have to be careful to distinguish a ~ morphophonemic and a ~ phonemic level: the former with word boundaries, the latter with aspiration, active deaspiration measures and pre-fortis clipping and all that jazz.
To be able to interpret it from the hearer’s point of view. The hearer can’t hear word/morpheme/syllable boundaries except by the mentioned kind of cues, which are therefore phonemic…
Prosodicists are happy with juncture marking of various types (including the prosodic word) — these are indeed ‘phonemic’ under a general enough definition (though I suppose really it’s the hierarchical prosodic layers that are meaningful, and the boundary effects are cues not for the junctures as such, but the whole unit well beyond the point of juncture), but whether they are ‘phonemes’ or not is, I think, a question linguists mostly just haven’t been terribly interested in for the past few decades.
AntC, thank you for reminding me of Edo Nyland’s name. I remember seeing his website back around 2001, and it was a lot of fun.
Old English had two allophones of initial *g, probably (at least in early OE) [ɣ] and [ʝ], though at some point the latter became [j]. There was also a phoneme [j]. All three could alliterate with one another — the first two, because of their phonemic relation; the latter two, because of their phonetic similarity (or perhaps identity)
Another option that comes to mind is that before the [ʝ] > [j] merger, also /j/ may have had [ʝ] as a possible allophone or a conditionally split reflex (with some overlap modulo theoretical approaches).
I’m reminded of the similar case in oldest Finnish — a [ʝ] allophone of /ɣ/ (before the unrounded front vowels /i e æ/) can be inferred from its eventual development to /j/, but also original etymological /j/ before /i e æ/ is in a few occasional cases spell’d g(h). This actually matches quite well with how the sequences /ji je/ were natively forbidden word-initially (also so was /ɣ/ though, giving e.g. Kiesus as the colloquial reflex of Jesus).
exoticized — we have three writing systems from the same family in fairly common use here, and Hebrew pops up too, so is नागरी really that exotic? Nobody objects to kana.
I doubt JC was objecting.
Remarks, then.
I’m reminded of the similar case in oldest Finnish
I’m reminded to ask if there are traces of influence from ancient Germanic poetics in Finnish (or Finnic) verse. I know that there’s alliteration in the poetry in the Kalavala tradition, but that’s too widespread to be diagnostic of anything on its own.
The principle of Internet circularity compels me to link to this take on the proposal.
Well, that’s pretty devastating. I’ll add it to the post.
I do have to add, though:
Who cares? There’s no reason to think either of them would have been borrowed as anything other than /s/ into the Germanic of the time (or long after).
Oh, that reminds me of Müller’s law: *RH > *RR – that way we can have a shill-ing without having to assume an anachronistic -ling. This is actually perfect.
There is no /d/ in *pě̀nę̄dzь; there is a /d͡z/ recently created from /g/ by one of the palatalizations (I think the Second). In other words, it’s borrowed from *penning.
I’m not aware of any “panding” form, but this is one of the words with unexplained inner-Germanic variation (irregular dissimilation?) between *-ing and *-ig (penny, German Pfennig, but place name Pfenningberg etc. etc.); another is king (German König).
In his most recent paper on the subject, Vennemann compromised, saying the runes have most of the proposed origins at once, so that the place of f at the beginning is Punic, but other things are Old Italic or whatever.
*RH > *RR specifically after the accent.
Müller’s thesis (in German) is here on Google Books; I haven’t read it yet, and probably won’t very soon.
I lie, of course; I’ve already started. But I might not finish soon; it does have some 300 pages, and they all seem to be included in the preview.
My point was that writing the English borrowing sandhi in the writing system used by the source language is exoticizing, in the same way that writing “I just went out and bought a самовар to make my tea” or “I like to put საწებელი on my shish kabob” would be. It’s harmless because this is Languagehat, where such things are expected.
Point taken.
But still many Greek and Russian words (and paragraphs) get quoted here without transliteration, whereas Sanskrit words are almost always transliterated. (Hebrew, Georgian, Runic, Glagolitic, even Gothic pop up on occasion, to stay in the family, but generally with transliteration. I don’t know how to sort them by exoticness).
Of course not, LOL. And the author isn’t on academia.edu (though several people with the same name are); I haven’t yet searched ResearchGate.
Which reminds me: Hat, is there any way you could set your blog up to show Mongolian traditional script (ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌) in connected form? It doesn’t need to be vertical, just connected.
Which reminds me: Hat, is there any way you could set your blog up to show Mongolian traditional script (ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌) in connected form? It doesn’t need to be vertical, just connected.
I see that your blog doesn’t accept user names in either Mongolian script (ᠬᠠᠯᠠᠳ᠋) or Cyrillic (Халаад).
It just puts them into moderation; I freed one of them and axed the other, figuring we didn’t need identical comments with varying usernames.
I can see ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌ in your comment just fine; isn’t it in connected form?
Seems to be a font issue: it’s all joined up comme il faut when I look at it on my Android tablet, but not on my laptop.
By the way, last time I caught a glimpse of the post title out of the corner of my eye I read it as “Panic in Proto-Germanic.” Which is a great title.
Occasional loanwords via trade can come from relatively distant sources, especially if transmitted thru some intermediaries. (There are, for example, some half a dozen loanwords originating from Latin in Proto-Finnic.)
Hence, no doubt, my favorite palindrome, saippuakauppias ‘soap merchant’.
@Hat
You’re right. It shows up fine on my iPhone but not on my Macbook.
Apple has always been crappy at accommodating Mongolian script. iOS regularly breaks it.
saippuakauppias: that was the longest palindrome in the Guinness book of World Records that I had almost 50 years ago — before it got all glitzy and non-nerdy. I remember that and the heaviest twins in the world on their motorbikes. (The McCrary twins, stage name McGuire, but I had to look that up right now).
There is this Ancient Custom whereby historical linguists (but not other linguists) are assumed to be able to transliterate Greek in their heads, whereas other scripts they (are assumed to) need transliterations for.
Of course, running text as opposed to single words in any language shouldn’t be transliterated at all. Unfortunately, WordPress has changed so that it doesn’t like posts with mixed scripts unless one script thoroughly dominates, so people posting comments like that need to transliterate where they normally would not.
I thought the HLs were supposed to be able to read Greek, sencillamente. Like three (3) pages of Homer before bed innit.
HLs were also supposed to be able to read Devanāgarī and Avestan, and maybe Armenian too, but then the European publishers lost the ability to print those (probably in WWI) and transcriptions have been used ever since.
were supposed to be able to read Greek
Πῶς γὰρ οὔ;
So never mind the script, how many HLs are working now who can just read Latin, Greek and Sanskrit for sense? (Beside English, French, German, Polish, Russian and Italian for reference works). I mean, that used to be a barely acceptable starting point.
Polish was probably pushing it (at least for non-Poles) even in the Heroic Age; maybe even Russian. The essential modern languages were probably German, French, English (in that order …)
I’d say German and French are still necessary. (French, at least, is certainly still very necessary for African comparative work, for obvious reasons.)
The big loser seems to have been German. As I’ve moaned before, linguistic works which a generation ago would have been in proper highfalutin scholastic German are now published in not-quite-correct badly-proofread EU English instead. (I’m looking at you, Brill.)
On the IE side, Jerzy Kuryłowicz wrote in French (and published a lot).
At least half of Tungusic linguistics has of course been done in Russian, to the extent that just two years ago a fellow named Eero Talvitie wrote a thesis on the Tungusic long vowels (I think it was) in Helsinki in Russian and even followed some of the literature in using Cyrillic letters with diacritics to represent Proto-Tungusic. The rest of Tungusic linguistics is in Chinese, Japanese, some French, and then English and maybe German.
Russian is certainly necessary for that whole area.
Chinese, Japanese and even Russian differ from the others in that they have never been international languages of modern scholarship (however worthy of it they are in themselves), so the effect of publishing in those languages exclusively is academic ghettoization. For some scholars, I suspect this is a feature rather than a bug.
I have a theory that Assyriology remains so stubbornly multi-lingual (not just because it’s a small, out-of-the-way discipline and so more inclined to methodological conservatism) because so much of the primary sources are housed in specific museums: If you want to study Ebla, you have to go to Italy. Lagash was mostly excavated by the French. German, English, French, and Italian are the only languages you’d ever need because those were the languages of the only European countries that got their hands on Mesopotamian antiquities in any appreciable quantity. The governments of Turkey and Iran encourage archeological research in their territory, and English wins out there because lord knows you’d never confuse an Oriental source language for a real European tool language. But the political situation in Iraq has prevented this from happening for the study of sites in its territory.
Were Europeans on the dexter side of the Iron Curtain publishing in Russian at all?
I’ll add it to the post.
The quote you’ve added, though, is not by me, it’s reblogged from Tristan “The Linguist Physicist” from Cambridge/Londonish. My own comments on @possessivesuffix begin with “Far from the worst nonsense…” after the link to the article.
(Yes, tumblr has been doing something weird with the order of comments in reblogs lately for some reason…)
Woops, sorry about that — I’ll fix the addition!
(Thanks, Hat.)
The Finnish lists for that usually give instead saippuakivikauppias ‘soapstone merchant’, but this already starts going down the chasm of words that have only been coined for their palindromic properties instead of having ever been used in authentic communication. A vivid example from a bit deeper down that I recall is tomaattimatokotamittaamot ‘tomato worm ?? measuring stations’, which parses fine syntactically but where it’s not even clear what sense of kota would be intended (something akin to siemenkota ‘seed pod, apple core, etc.’?)
Slight extenuating circumstances: Russian is his first language and IIRC he adopted the name Eero Talvitie only after moving to Finland. But that Russian was thought of as an option at all does count for something.
Basically every Uralic group other than Hungarian or Sami also has a long tradition of research published in Russian. For a few particular languages (Karelian, Komi, Selkup?) I think it has not even been the second fiddle to German or English. French is meanwhile way down the list, maybe at seventh place behind Estonian and falling.
J Pystynen, Soapstone is greenish, quite like granite in texture but with veining like marble and good for kitchen counters (where marble erodes over time) and fireplaces. I’ve needed a soapstone merchant occasionally. In that case, granite or marble from any old mason or stoneyard wouldn’t do. When you need soapstone, you REALLY need it. I’ve also worked in Finland as an architect. The two have never coincided; however, that’s just chance. I’m sure other people are desperate to find for soapstone merchants in Helsinki and Turku all the time. So it’s a perfectly straightforward palindrome, in my opinion.
Russian has been, though only behind the Iron Curtain (so international more in name than otherwise), and even there it was never as exclusive as English is today.
In the mid-20th century, the Chinese journal Vertebrata PalAsiatica occasionally had papers in Russian.
Russian has been, though only behind the Iron Curtain
Fair point.
….and even more specifically only when a vowel followed, because *-CHC- > *-CC- happened earlier, finds Müller. In short, *ˈ(-)VRHV- > *(-)VRːV-.
In Japanese 英仏独 ei-futsu-doku ‘Britain, France, and Germany; English-French-German’ is a kind of mantra, although it’s probably becoming anachronistic now. It reflects the world that Japan modernised into.
Bathrobe, have you seen the film The Wind Rises, Japanese 風立ちぬ ? It’s a beautifully drawn animation on that very subject, the interwar-period world that Japan modernised into. (I watched it via Netflix.)
I missed it. Ensconced in China at the time.
Wouldn’t mind watching it if I can get hold of it. Miyazaki is one of my favourites.
But the actual period Japan modernised into was the late 19th century when Britain, France, and Germany were at the heart of European power and provided the model for Japan’s modernisation. (The Japanese were, of course, also very much into the US.)
Do find it; mostly because of the graphics and also because of the way he decided to depict technology and life in Japan during that period. It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen. It’s set then because it’s a biography of a famous aircraft engineer, the man who designed the Mitsubishi Zero. He takes trips around the world, stopping off to observe skeptically the Junkers plant in Dessau and admire some early Italian designed planes that feature a lot in the film (Britain & America don’t come up much, France not at all). You wouldn’t expect that to make a great movie. There are no war scenes, it’s all butterflies & Alpine wildflowers, aircraft being drawn by oxen taking a day to get to the runway.
When you need soapstone, you REALLY need it
Yes, that’s enough for the veneer of seeming like a plausibly real word. Too bad that kauppias means ‘merchant’ in the sense of ‘person specializing in the trade of a particular product’, not in the more general sense of ‘vendor’.
We could indeed also think of a context where let’s say saippuakamariviramakauppias ‘soap chamber virāma merchant’ would be useful; perhaps an Indian guild of soap merchants gets really into fridge-magnet-esque rearrangeable sculpted Devanāgari letters with diacritics sold separately?
Day saved.
let’s say saippuakamariviramakauppias
Well, give me five minutes to practise and I can try. I agree that diacritics should always be sold separately in any fridge decorations. I don’t really understand your specialist and vendor distinction but my immediate image of a soapstone Merchant is a statue or monument to Antonio or to the stage set of the Merchant of Venice. You must decide if that could be described by saippuakivikauppias. They all seem reasonable to me, even your very long one. Now do it in iambic pentameter.
Shouldn’t it be viraama? If it isn’t, I’m disappointed in Finnish. Languages with phonemic vowel quantity should stick together.
That’s like saying inflected languages should stick together, but they don’t do that. When someone speaking inflected language A learns inflected language B informally, without grammar instruction, they often end up speaking it without inflection or with minimal inflection. See the extreme case of Norfolk traditional dialect, where the uninflected foreigner-talk spread to the whole native population.
Best I can do:
http://accidentalbear.com/natalie-merchant-giving-up-everything-in-new-music-video/
Alas, the mask is probably just plaster.
That’s like saying inflected languages should stick together, but they don’t do that
Phonology is another matter, though: tone languages do preserve tones in borrowing (admittedly adapting them to fit their own tonemics) and languages with length contrasts do keep them in loanwords.
So if the Finns borrowed the word orally from actual Sanskritophones …
There are even English-based creoles with tones, where stress was interpreted as tone… but apparently no French-based ones.
English loanwords in Kusaal tend to represent English stress with a high tone that doesn’t conform to the usual tone sandhi rules, as in lɔ́r(ɛ̀) “car”, plural lɔ́yà, contrasted with gɛ́l “egg”, plural gɛ̄lá, which shows the expected regular pattern.
It’s interesting (but not at all unexpected for an African tone language) that the borrowed tone pattern is actually more resistant to analogical remodelling than the segmental form is.
Unsurprisingly, the tones of loanwords from Hausa are a lot more integrated, and have regularly undergone word-internal tone sandhi changes in parallel with Kusaal native vocabulary (in fact, if there were a good way of dating the adoption of the Hausa loans, you could use this to date the Kusaal tone changes.)
The matter is further complicated by the fact that some English loans have evidently been transmitted via Hausa … (like wādá “law”, from Hausa óódà, English “order.”)
Stress interferes in Finnish too: foreign non-initial vowel length in loanwords is fairly consistently overriden by a prescribed rule that non-initial vowel length is to be used for rendering foreign contrastive stress in open syllables (following the example of Swedish and perhaps Vulgar Latin where long vowels only occur in these cases).
The best evidence that certain borrowings into Middle High German had non-initial stress comes from the ones that were passed on to Hungarian, a language that retains merciless word-initial stress to this day: upon borrowing, Hungarian used to harmonize the vowels to the one that was stressed in the source.
On languages used in historical linguistics – on one hand, there is a school of thought that any IE linguist should be able to read and be aware of anything written in any IE language. I still fondly remember the late Erich Neu handing back a seminar paper of mine on Slavic endings with a note indicating that I had overlooked a relevant paper on the topic written in Lithuanian. On the other hand, my impression is that e.g. Russian isn’t read much by IE linguists outside of specific sub-fields like Balto-Slavic or IE accentuation, echoing a complaint by Lev Gumilev from the 60s that Rossica non leguntur. E.g. I have read some good ideas on Lachmann’s law by Otkupshchikov from the 50s or 60s that I haven’t seen mentioned in any Western language articles on that question.
Lachmann’s law is always intriguing, so please tell me what they are!
But of course there are examples of Russian literature being overlooked in IE linguistics by people who can apparently read it. Here’s a paper from 2014 or later that trounces Dybo’s law (shortening of pretonic long vowels after the postvocalic laryngeals were gone), explicitly stating in the abstract and the introduction that it’s only supposed to apply in Italo-Celtic and not e.g. in Germanic, citing Dybo’s original publication of 1961 and his follow-up work on Italo-Celtic from 2007, but not this openly accessible paper from 2008, again by Dybo himself, which is explicitly about Dybo’s law applying in Germanic. Somebody with a lot of time and dictionaries should check if the criticisms still apply to the 2008 paper…
Lachmann’s law is always intriguing, so please tell me what they are!
In a nutshell, his idea is that Lachmann doesn’t apply to cases where the derivation of words that results in a contact of plain voiced and unvoiced stop already happened in PIE, but only where the derivation happened later or the contact is due to later apocope. Specifically, he claims that the in cases where the participle in -to- causes Lachmann indicates that PIE didn’t have a verbal adjective in *-tó-, but in *-nó- for these specific verbs / roots.
That’s similar to pp. 405–416 in this book from 2004, where Jasanoff presented about the same idea (most of the input to Lachmann’s law was generated by post-PIE analogy, and the rest by post-PIE syncope) without citing Otkupshchikov or mentioning *-nó-. Jasanoff cited Andersen (1969), which is about lack of certain voicing assimilations in Ukrainian and does not cite Otkupshchikov either – the striking similarity to Lachmann’s law is mentioned in a footnote, only to be dismissed by a claim that Lachmann’s law didn’t exist, citing Watkins’s work that had not yet appeared and has meanwhile been trounced by Jasanoff (2004)…
I need to find some time to read that and re-read Otkupshchikov. I remember reading Jasanoff’s take on the matter and finding it different to what Otkupshchikov was saying. But it’s a couple of years since I read both.
[…] our word “penny” derives from the Punic word for “face,” panē. Punic coins were minted with the face of the goddess Tania, so we believe panē would have been a likely name for a Carthaginian coin” (Robert Mail hammer).
If that is right, should not the reflexes of the Phoenician for ‘face’ in Germanic languages mean ‘coin’? The question may be put another way: if “Punic coins showed the face of the goddess Tania,” why single out the coin of just one denomination to mean ‘face’?
At least many and maybe all the names of the ancient Israelite ~ Hebrew ~ Jewish coins are the Hebrew names of weights, all of which seem to be of Canaanite origin (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/weights-measures). The Canaanites were the southern branch of a people the northern branch of which were the Phoenicians.
If so, a numismonym literally meaning ‘face’, just like those that definitely come from the names of what the coins depict (Danish krone ‘crown’, German Kreuz[er] ‘cross’, etc.), is too modern for a coin or coins so old as Phoenician ones.
Have Vennemann and Mailhammer considered these questions?
1. If the influence of Phoenician on Germanic was so great as we claim, should we not expect to find at least a few Phoenician inscriptions on Germanic speech territory?
2. Should we not also expect to find at least some non-linguistic evidence, such as pottery and other objects (in the “Phoenician style,” whatever that may have been) on Germanic speech territory?
3. Should we not expect to find that the linguistic and non-linguistic evidence is mostly along the borders of Germanic speech territory bathed by the Atlantic Ocean and its arms?
(It has been suggested that [The] Solent, the name of the strait between the Isle of Wight and the mainland, comes from Hebrew סלעים ‘rocks’ [see Coates 2009, who wisely mentions the suggestion but takes no stand on it; suggestions of non-Hebrew etymons are given here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solent).
4. Should we not also expect at least some influence in the opposite direction – Germanic > Phoenician — especially since the speakers of Germanic must have been far more numerous than the Phoenicians?
5. Indeed, were there enough Phoenicians and Carthaginians to populate areas outside the Mediterranean more than sparsely? Were most or all of their known settlements anything more than small trading stations?
6. Has the strong possibility of chance similarities (all the stronger to the extent that the comparanda are shorter) been considered?
7. Regarding syntax, given the relatively small number of permutations (SVO, SOV, etc.), are not chance similarities all the likelier?
8. What about the claimed Semitic influence on Celtic, such as the inflection of prepositions for person and number? (Examples in various languages here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflected_preposition#Semitic).
9. Were there enough Semitic settlers outside the Mediterranean to support both Vennemann and Mailhammer’s suggestions AND those regarding Semitic and Celtic?
Influence on the behavior of prepositions is an example of deep linguistic influence (in contrast to, say, the borrowing of words by one group of speakers to designate realia absent in their culture and present in that of the other group, which is an example of superficial influence).
If there is deep influence, there must also be superficial influence (speakers of language X do not come into contact with speakers of language Y and the first thing they say to one another is ‘Y has a really neat way of inflecting prepositions; let’s adopt it’).
In short, there is a hierarchy of kinds of linguistic influence, so that the researcher must make sure that if deep influence is posited, superficial influence has been found too.
“[…] the danger of theorizing on the basis of individual snippets of data runs risks which are too well known to need emphasizing” (Coates 2009)
Coates, Richard. 2009. “A Glimpse through a Dirty Window into an Unlit House: Names of Some North-west European Islands.” In Ahrens et alii 2009:228-242.
Ahrens, Wolfgang, Sheila Embleton, and André Lapierre, eds. 2009. Names in Multi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural and Multi-Ethnic Contact: Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Onomastic Sciences: August 17-22, 2008. Toronto. York University.
The post ends “It’s nonsense built on nonsense.” I don’t think you need to invest so much effort into demolishing it.
It may be nice to without a need to!
The linked WP article on the Solent does hint in the general direction of a Celtic etymology. The element “(w)ent” is given as Venta “market, town”, specifically Venta Belgarum “Winchester”, and later the origin of the name of the kingdom/administrative region of Gwent . Another district Gwent was centered around Venta Silurum in Wales. So far, so good. But what is Sol-? If the second element is a specific geographic location, it should be the head of the compound and preferably mean something like “sound” or “inlet”.
I wanted to suggest something else entirely, a meaning “muddy” derived from *sal(u)- “mud”, parallel to Derwent from *deru- “oak”, but I don’t think that works for the vowel, maybe not even for the s.
1. Well, yes, if there’s anything to write on. Plenty of rocks in Scandinavia, true, but the other shores of the North Sea are all mud, except for cliffs that keep eroding.
2. Sure.
3. At the time in question, pretty much all of Germanic was spoken there, and everything farther south spoke Celtic. Add a few historically known migrations (from the Cimbri & Teutones & Ambrones onward), and any originally coastal features are expected to show up everywhere by the time evidence begins to be left.
4. On Phoenician back home in Carthage or Phoenicia? No.
5. The idea (Vennemann has been at this for decades) is that there were just enough Phoenicians to form a short-lived superstrate on Germanic.
6. Considered, yes, and dismissed a bit too quickly.
7. Likewise. There’s at least one other explanation for how SVO came to appear in Germanic main clauses – a causal explanation rather than “who knows, randomly” –, but I can’t remember Vennemann addressing it. (I once read basically all his work on his academia.edu page.)
8. That is supposed to be a substrate: the pre-IE population of the British Isles and basically western France is identified with the megalith culture, which in turn is hypothesized to be Semitic-adjacent in this scenario. (Basque-adjacent seems more likely to me.)
9. See 8: two separate things – a Semitic-adjacent substrate in Celtic, and a much later Phoenician superstrate in Germanic. (In his earliest works on the topic, Vennemann tried to postulate a single substrate to explain both the Celtic and the Germanic similarities to Semitic, but he gave up on that long ago.)
@Trond
Your “muddy” is suggested for Solway, but the second element there is clearly Viking, whereas Sol(u)ent is attested AD 731. Looking at those two, I would like to find *sul/sol related to “gaps filled with seawater” But no luck.
@ David Marjanović:
piluccare is not a mere reconstruction, though — it is found as such in Italian, where it is quite a usual word.
Of course you are right that it is unattested in Latin, but, as far as I can see, related forms in other Romance languages do allow us to posit *pi(l)uc(c)are at least for the Proto-Romance stage.
PP: Your “muddy” is suggested for Solway, but the second element there is clearly Viking, whereas Sol(u)ent is attested AD 731.
I know. It must be Celtic or older, and the *-ent derivation is Celtic too.*
Looking at those two, I would like to find *sul/sol related to “gaps filled with seawater” But no luck.
Yes. I looked up the etymology of Solway to see if that could support a common Celtic element “sound” or “inlet”, but the ON etymology (~ Sölvað, i.e. “Mudford”) is quite straightforward — and containing the very same Germanic word that made me want a Celtic cognate. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a folk etymology, of course.
*) Now that I think of it, it looks like it could have a cognate pattern in Norwegian. There’s a set of archaic toponyms ending in -und, preceded by an element denoting (usually) some natural feature. I can’t think of any fjords or sounds on this pattern, though. And it’s not relevant to the matter at hand since the phonology is very different from the Celtic form.
There’s the Welsh halen “salt”, Old Irish salann, from *sal- “salt, sea salt” (according to GPC.)
“Salt”/”sea”/”inlet” is one of those ad hoc chains of semantic slippage that the long-rangers like. Also the vowel is wrong. But apart from all that …
@Trond Engen. Can one justify seeing any part of the hydronym Solvent as possibly meaning ‘market’? One would expect such a morpheme only in the name of an inhabited place.
Yeah, well. The evidence seems to show that the etymon originally meaning “market” became the name of administrative towns and then of the districts surrounding them. A sound or inlet could be named after the town or the district that it leads to.
Another thought! What if it’s simply Latin solvent- “loosening”, maybe “unleashing” the tide?
@ Trond. Venta is always the first element in place names (Venta Belgarum, Venta Icenorum. Venta Silurum) and the second element is always an ethnonym in the genitive plural (‘Market of the Belgae’, etc.).
Solent does not fit that pattern at all and a hydronym meaning ‘Market…’ is counter-intuitive.
There comes a moment when one must say “Origin unknown.”
AntC asks for the origin of the family name Mailhammer. It means ‘native and/or resident of Mailheim (an inhabited place near Ipsheim, Bavaria)’. -hammer is the Bavarian spelling, corresponding to -heimer in New High German.
Me: There’s a set of archaic toponyms ending in -und, preceded by an element denoting (usually) some natural feature. I can’t think of any fjords or sounds on this pattern, though.
Yes, I can. The lake Femunden might be an example. I’m sure there are more.
“Might”, since except for the suffix, which may or may not include the -m-, the meaning is opaque. On the face of it, Fe-mund looks like an ON compound of “wealth” and “holding”, but that can’t be it. Store Norske Leksikon suggests a relation to either feim “foam” or fim “wet soil”. If so, it fits the pattern of und-derivations.
I don’t know why I’m called to defend an etymology I really want to overturn, but I take the calling seriously.
Venta is the first part, the head, of Latin compounds denoting a town or marketplace. Later it’s the second part, the specifier, of a Brythonic compound Cair Went naming the fortification in what will eventually be anglified as Winchester — or so it seems from its Modern Welsh name Caerwynt. Anyway, it’s clearly a valid compound in Brythonic. The idea must be a parallel compound *Sol Went for the sound.
Placenames of the pattern Caer X aren’t exactly compounds, inasmuch as the second element was originally in the genitive, as revealed by the “umlaut”* in Caerdyf “Fort of (the river) Taff” (now called Caerdydd by the Young People of Today); it looks like Caerwynt is actually another umlauted one, in fact, assuming that the second element really is from *wentā (from a Modern Welsh standpoint it just looks like gwynt “wind.”) Admittedly, the soft mutation after the masculine noun caer looks compound-y, but Welsh does peculiar things with mutation in fixed expressions like this, like soft-mutating epithets after masculine proper names (as in Macsen Wledig, Hywel Dda) and showing soft mutation after even masculine adjectives when they precede their nouns.
*Usually called “i-affection”, to confuse the Germans.
I saw the mutation but didn’t notice the umlaut. That makes it hard to argue for a completely parallel derivation as a genitive construction/compound. But does it need to be? Fortification is arguably a feature of the town itself while an inlet is merely characterized by the proximity. How does compounding in toponyms work if the second element is a nearby feature (“hill creek”) rather than a “possessor” (“creek of the hill”)?
The great majority of Welsh toponyms seem to be of the form X Y “X of Y” (this being just the normal way of expressing possession with two nouns, which I think blocks X Y being used appositionally*); some have got more fused than others, so you get dozens of places called Llanfair “Church of Mary” but also names like Betws-y-Coed “Chapel of the Wood”, Penybont “Head of the Bridge.”
Proper tatpurusha-type compounds in Welsh aren’t common**, but it so happens that one conveniently just came up in another thread: gwyddbwyll “chess”, literally “wood-wisdom”: the modifier precedes. Another one is teulu “family” (“house-troop”), though that’s not synchronically recognisable as a compound. Irish compounds have the same order.
*Except in the case of epithets of people: Manawyddan fab Llŷr “M, son of L”, and similarly, of course, all the Welsh patronymics like Dafydd ap Rhys “David Preece” etc. (ap for fab, mutated from mab.)
**Never thought about this before. I wonder if it’s connected with the change to VSO word order? (Replacing dependent-head compounds with head + dependent noun phrases, that is.)
Now I think of it, this replacement of modifier-head compounds by head + modifier phrases must postdate the Roman period: compare (say) Camulodunum “Colchester” with Din Eidyn (now) “Edinburgh.” So the modern Brythonic languages are not directly relevant to your point with regard to order.*
(This is also a point against my attempt to tie this reversal together with the development of VSO order: as Irish shares that, I suppose VSO needs to be projected back to the Roman period. But Welsh has gone from VSO to SVO and back to VSO over the past two millennia, and Breton and Cornish stuck with SVO, which must therefore be Brythonic … my head hurts.)
*If there had been a British compound placename *Solowenta “Something-market”, by analogy it should have ended up in Welsh as “Gwent Sul” or something.
For Brythonic rather than Welsh placenames- *Moridunon (Latin Moridunum) presumably counts as attributive+substantive (“sea-fort”). Later of course Moridunon became Myrddin and the place became Caerfyrddin “fort of someone called Myrddin” (after the real origin of the name had been forgotten), showing the opposite, modern order.
I have to eat my words about Welsh compounds, having cogitated for five minutes: I was forgetting, for example, the myriad compounds with -wr “man” (from gwr) as the second element, like myfyriwr “student” (“study*-man”) and vast numbers of others. Still, at least they illustrate that the order is the familiar Indoeuropean one.
*Yet another Latin loanword. I suppose we only had druids before the Romans came. No schools …
@anhweol:
Hey! so Merlin is a toponymic etiological myth? I Did Not Know That.
(That’ll teach him to mess with Nimue. Patroness of all #metoo. She got him in his ontology, where it hurts.)
Yet another Latin loanword.
I’ll be damned:
Reverting to Trond and our sheep, I suppose that even if the second element of Welsh binomial toponyms was originally genitive and even if they are still formally possessive constructions, that doesn’t in fact necessarily preclude an appositional meaning, as with Latin “appositional genitives”*, or English constructions like “the town of Monmouth”, or indeed Welsh expressions like dinas Abertawe “the city of Swansea.” So that was something of a red herring. Sorry, Trond.
Still interesting about the decompounding and the order reversal, though.
*Which don’t seem to be all that common, but when they do occur, it’s often indeed after generic place words like oppidum “town.”
Sorry for what? Red herrings are delicious when skillfully prepared.
I don’t think I mean exactly “town of Swansea” types of compounds. Here swanseaness is an intrinsic or inalienable feature of the town. Think “Greenland Sea” or “Dover Strait”.
By “Brythonic compound” I should have specified “Post-Roman Brythonic”, since the head-final structure of a name like Camulodunum is obviuos. But I don’t really know that the reversed structure spread very far, so the discussion is enlightening in its inconclusiveness..
Way aporetic, dude!
I suppose it started with VSO as the default and SVO (and likely others) for special occasions. The Romance ad- or substrate greatly lowered the threshold for what counted as special, so SVO ended up as the default in the more Romance-influenced Cornish and Breton, while the Church Latin superstrate allowed SVO to emerge as the default in literary Middle Welsh, even if perhaps not quite in the spoken language…
I have a review paper lying around somewhere on my harddisk on the emergence of verb-second order in OHG. People have measured the decrease of verb-first and verb-third sentences over time…
…Ouchie.
@David Marjanović: Your comment reminded me of something that I found interesting. The words substrate and superstrate (and of course earlier substratum and superstratum, which are basic post-classical Latin) are old terms for physical layers that were adapted metaphorically in linguistics. Substrate, in particular, is a relatively common word in a number of technical contexts beyond geology; we use it all the time in surface science, when discussing thinly layered materials or solid surfaces in a fluid environment. However, adstrate and adstratum are strictly linguistic terms, and according to the OED, they are only attested in English from the mid-twentieth century (1939 and 1963, respectively—although equivalent forms appear slightly earlier in Dutch).
>Substrate, in particular, is a relatively common word in a number of technical contexts beyond geology; we use it all the time in surface science
We use it all the time in our turtle tank.
Which is perhaps just one of the subfields of applied surface science.
Brett: Substrate, in particular, is a relatively common word in a number of technical contexts beyond geology; we use it all the time in surface science
Ryan: We use it all the time in our turtle tank.
The substrate of turtles is turtles.
Also, there should be an animated Film Noir antihero named Tank Turtle.
All together now: It’s turtles all the way down!
And Yertle the Turtle is king of it all.
I suggest that the Ertebølle Folk substrate has more to do with the sound-shifts et alia of Proto-Germanic than anything Afro-Asiatic brought by Megalithic Proto-Berbers, or anything Semitic brought by the Phoenicians of Carthage. I am helpless to argue for this position, knowing nothing of the language of the Ertebølle Folk, except by reference to what Calvert Watkins contributed as Germanic roots not found in other branches of Indo-European. If you go through the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, and flag just those roots, you find evidence of a heirarchical society much afflicted by cold and mud. I have argued this point before. My only strength is that the Berber and Punic speculations are pretty damned feeble. What we do know about the Ertebølle Folk is that they were more settled and sedentary than most pre-agricultural societies. Their sea-based economy supported a high population, and their way of life could integrate non-violently with invading agriculturalists and pastorialists. So the upshot is, I’m a substrate fan. The fate of my theory lies in your gentle hands. Isn’t there a doctoral thesis somewhere in Denmark that supports my speculation?
You’ve forgotten a critical bit of evidence that those advancing the Punic theory can provide for their founders — from which of the sons of Japheth were the Ertebølle Folk descended?
@Phil Jennings, I did a quick Google search for language and EBK in Danish, but it’s all about material culture — this article just says that the immigrant TRB culture must have had a different language, but it has a lot of references you might use to chase down authors (even though it’s 20 years old).
Here is the home page of the U of Copenhagen unit for Research in Dialect and Language Change, though their horizon seems to be a century rather than 10000 years. Still they might know someone.
@ Lars Mathiesen, Thank you. I’ve learned just now that Google Translate does far better with Danish than with Norwegian. What my relatives speak across the fjord from Trondheim is apparently non-standard, regardless of the standard being chosen.
The article cites evidence that the transition to agriculture was not violent or abrupt, It also suggests that immigrants may have been involved. We seem to have swung from migrating hordes to no migrating hordes, and now back to a middle position.
In such an environment, different languages can influence each other, if both populations sustain their numbers.
According to the author’s analysis, the Nazis liked migrating hordes so “we” (Scandinavian scholarship) didn’t after the war, but “we” got better. He is not a university researcher, by the way, he was a department head in the Danish Tax Authority who started writing about prehistory after retirement, but it looks like an informed synthesis of the published scholarship at the time. (Up to 2000. He even adds the real year of submission for references that were published in backdated volumes of journals — no 100-year delays but just 3-4 years can alter the who-probably-read-whom ordering).
Is Ertebølle the same as Pitted Ware?
EBK is before TRB, Price Waterhouse Coopers is after. He says, slinging around TLAs like the experts do.
(Unless reading WP makes me an expert).
Please, that’s PricewaterhouseCoopers (lowercase “w,” camelcase “C”). I was working for PW when the merger happened, and we peons were vastly amused by the huge amount of money they paid the branding company that came up with that genius solution.
Ah, then Gmc is highly unlikely to have been in any contact with EBK.
Lars Mathisen: EBK is before TRB, Price Waterhouse Coopers is after.
Yes. Well there’s overlap. Pitted Ware is famously the Return of the Hunter-Gatherers. They thrived for about a millennium as specialists in marine harvesting within the European trade network. The culture finally came to an end in the late-mid 3rd millennim, after what may well have been a Eurasian pandemic. Germanic could have arrived at several points, and this is one of them.
Their closest descendants of the PWC people live in the Eastern Baltic. Maybe we should start substrate hunting with Latvian ichtyonymy.
Hat: PricewaterhouseCoopers (lowercase “w,” camelcase “C”)
Watered-down camelcase.
Phil Jennings: Thank you. I’ve learned just now that Google Translate does far better with Danish than with Norwegian. What my relatives speak across the fjord from Trondheim is apparently non-standard, regardless of the standard being chosen.
What they speak is one thing. Judging by geography, that’s probably a pretty average Trønder. What they write is something else. In that region it’s usually Bokmål for official purposes, but dialect in sosial media.
Sounds like we should indeed!
Do Norwegians start off trilingual in Bokmål, Nynorsk, and their local dialect, and then just add languages?
Those growing up in the Nynorsk regions do. Those in Bokmål regions hardly have enough exposure to Nynorsk (or interest) to develop an active command.
Actually PwC is not half bad as a letter mark, the weight is symmetric and the w in the middle is cute. Generally I’m agin conglomerates dropping most or all of their old names in favour of made up words. (Looking at you, Accenture). So it could have been worse. I just can’t see PWC in other contexts without reading it out like the company. Also a pox on brand consultants, may all their fees turn to coal.
So it could have been worse.
Oh, absolutely. It also could have been suggested by pretty much anyone; we peons agreed we would have done the branding for, say, half of what they paid the consultants.
@Phil Jennings: How about Kristian Kristiansen: When language meets archaeology: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic in northern Europe (in the same Olsen Festschrift that I think someone else mentioned very recently).
His whole publication list is full of ancient DNA.
Accenture changed its name because Anderson Consulting had been one of the leading causes of the Great Recession…
Counterexample: the still officially nameless KroKuWAZ-Mediamil complex that controls a good chunk of Austria’s media landscape.
One of Kristiansen’s publications is the theme for How the Corded Ware culture was formed in 2017 and later discussion.
This paper is mentioned as forthcoming:
Rune Iversen & Guus Kroonen (2017): Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia.
I’ll add it as a comment to the post as well.
“Implemented”?
Was Indo-European adopted in southern Scandinavia pursuant to the recommendations of a consulting firm?
With the exception of that odd choice of diction, the article is a lot easier to understand than. It seems to underplay the scale of the steppe influx, calling it “detectable.”
The idea that commonalities in agricultural language across Latin, Germanic and Slavic branches but not present in Asian branches might reflect inheritances from a common non-IE precursor language or dialect continuum present since the arrival of neolithic farmers is interesting.
David, Andersen Consulting changed its name long before the Great Recession, and did so largely in the aftermath of finally gaining full independence from Arthur Andersen, its former parent firm. This other company was later dismembered for accounting fraud in an incident several years earlier than the recession, though arguably endemic and relevant to its causes.
PwC.
It’s all a dim memory now but as it happens I worked in a professional capacity early in my career (along with many many others) on the complicated legal dispute re Andersen Consulting’s “divorce” from Arthur Andersen (to simplify a very complex situation). One of the conditions of the decision was that the AC side could keep using “Andersen” as part of its name going forward, subject to paying a royalty to the AA side, and the AC side then decided that continuing to use the old name was not worth having to pay for it so they’d just pick a new name. The “divorce ruling” was I believe in 1999 and they announced the new name in 2000, effective as of 1/1/2001.
@J.W. Brewer: That was a prescient decision by the Accenture people, given how radioactive the “Arthur Andersen” name became after their accountants were caught abetting the Enron fiasco in 2001.
Ah, that had escaped me completely.
The mention of turtle tanks reminded me that “turtle tank” is occasionally used as a heavily gendered insult describing an undesirable body odors. It has an Urban Dictionary entry, and appeared here in Orange is the New Black.
I am of high alemannic German background, specifically alpine walsers. Genetic Ydna Levantine haplogroups, and the linguistic geography of the upper Rhine and alps point to an early amalgamation of proto suebi and some other Levantine DNA. Carthage and the people sent to serve as the rear supply of Hannibal and Hastrubal never went home to be enslaved or slaughtered. They stayed. It’s an interesting thought with DNA evidence, and potentially linguistic extant fragments remaining.
And a rather alternative theory:
The Origin of the Rhaetians by Alfréd Tóth
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40466876?seq=1
I do not know why but I read “conserved” here as “canned” (as in Russian):
We can date this event exactly because the battle that took place was engraved in two steles. One of which is almost completely conserved and is one of the earliest proofs of the presence of the horse in Egypt
….
To the Northern African origin of the Amorites points also that they were represented on the Egyptian monuments with fair skin, light hair, blue eyes, curved or hooked noses, and of great stature. They were fierce tribal clansmen who forced themselves into lands they needed to graze their herds. Though herdsmen, the Amorites were not peaceful pastoralists.
He is funny (I opened it in the middle).
Peaceful pastoralists mostly exist in pastoral poetry, as Gibbon noted.
And you’re sure you’re not simply looking at Jewish ancestry?
Hey, some guy named Brunner proved it in a long series of articles, so it’s TRUFAX. Nobody needs to know Etruscan or historical linguistics.
“peaceful”
“The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it–why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both.
There are a good many “contemplatives” among our peasants.
(P-V, becaue it comes up first in google)
… he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something.
Wow, that’s bad.
Garnett:
There is a remarkable picture by the painter Kramskoy, called “Contemplation.” There is a forest in winter, and on a roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a peasant in a torn kaftan and bark shoes. He stands, as it were, lost in thought. Yet he is not thinking; he is “contemplating.” If anyone touched him he would start and look at one as though awakening and bewildered. It’s true he would come to himself immediately; but if he were asked what he had been thinking about, he would remember nothing. Yet probably he has, hidden within himself, the impression which had dominated him during the period of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his soul’s salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native village, and perhaps do both. There are a good many “contemplatives” among the peasantry.
…стоит и как бы задумался, но он не думает, а что-то “созерцает”.
Better punctuation, but that part still reads like something written by somebody who doesn’t really know English.
@brett
1. This is 19C prose. I remember reading “Hero of Our Time” and thinking it could have been written in the 20th century. But I think even the 19C readers preferred this kind of thing.
2. P-V has “most likely…most likely…”. This is inept for me. Also “little peasant”. Was the man small? Garnett has “as though awakening and bewildered”. For me, even in 19C this should be something like “bewildered, as one who suddenly wakes from a dream”. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
The original then:
«У живописца Крамского есть одна замечательная картина под названием “Созерцатель”: изображен лес зимой, и в лесу, на дороге, в оборванном кафтанишке и лаптишках стоит один-одинешенек, в глубочайшем уединении забредший мужичонко, стоит и как бы задумался, но он не думает, а что-то “созерцает”. Если б его толкнуть, он вздрогнул бы и посмотрел на вас, точно проснувшись, но ничего не понимая. Правда, сейчас бы и очнулся, а спросили бы его, о чем он это стоял и думал, то наверно бы ничего не припомнил, но зато наверно бы затаил в себе то впечатление, под которым находился во время своего созерцания. Впечатления же эти ему дороги, и он наверно их копит, неприметно и даже не сознавая, — для чего и зачем, конечно, тоже не знает: может, вдруг, накопив впечатлений за многие годы, бросит все и уйдет в Иерусалим, скитаться и спасаться, а может, и село родное вдруг спалит, а может быть, случится и то, и другое вместе. Созерцателей в народе довольно»
Diminutives:
в оборванном кафтанишке и лаптишках стоит один-одинешенек, в глубочайшем уединении забредший мужичонко,
Well, if there were translation problem sets, this one would come with an asterisk.
I mean, we here asterisk problems that students can (and should) solve, but sort-of-are-not-obliged to. The dessert, as opposed to soup.
Muzhichonko = literally “wee peasant” (or “wee piece of a peasant”!) but you could say something like “one of the locals” or “a local man/labourer”.
Naverno…naverno: I think “probably…probably” sounds better than “most likely ..most likely”
Если б его толкнуть, он вздрогнул бы и посмотрел на вас, точно проснувшись, но ничего не понимая.
= if you touched him, he would give a start and look at you, having just awakened, understanding nothing.
I don’t know why Garnett had to compress this-the Russian is much more effective.
that part still reads like something written by somebody who doesn’t really know English.
What would you suggest, given that it accurately reflects the Russian?
Dostoevsky is not exactly a smooth stylist in Russian.
The fragment “…стоит и как бы задумался, но он не думает, а что-то “созерцает” ” is smooth.
The whole is not:)
He is “translanguaguing”, how the gym bubbe’s admirers would put it. He is switching between modes and registers and switching fluently, in the sense: “it looks spontanoues because it is spontaneous”. Like my writing maybe: it is never a good English, but I typed this without thinking. I do not know if it is good or bad, but it is not an even surface, it is up and down. Paticularly (and this one is deliberate, maybe) the folksy plaintive intimate Russian один-одинёшенек and then darker and solemn Slavonic near synonym в глубочайшем уединении.
—-
The line quoted by Brett is discourse. I am describing my impression and trying to find appropriate words. We are in my kitchen. And Dostoyevsky is using means characteristic for Russian discourse (particularly conjunctions).
Sure. I hope you didn’t get the impression I was dissing Dostoevsky; he’s one of my very favorite writers. But a paragraph by him is not like a paragraph by, say, Bunin. And I still want to know how Brett would improve on “he is not thinking; he is ‘contemplating.’” That’s what the Russian says.
If that’s what it says, and it’s as apparently contradictory in Russian as in English, then I guess that’s the right translation. But saying that “contemplating” is not “thinking” sounds naively like a translation error, suggesting that it is using “contemplate” in place of a Russian cognate that has a somewhat different valance.
“I guess that’s the right translation” sounds pretty grudging. You seem to be grumpy about the translators when you should be grumpy about Dostoevsky.
“he is not thinking; he is ‘contemplating’” makes perfect sense to me. Is this mental state so rare?
It makes sense to me too, but I may have been corrupted by reading all that Russian.
Apparently this book is not on Brett’s syllabus:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64794.Dancing_Wu_Li_Masters
If I had to draw a clear distinction between the two types of mental activity as in the text, I would suggest that by “thinking” is meant something focused, and by “contemplating” is meant something unfocused. Perhaps “woolgathering” would have been a more accurate conveyance of the concept than the latter?
Regarding the diminutive — could it have been meant as a reference to class, or status hierarchy within the class? Not just an average peasant, but a lowly peasant? A humble peasant, perhaps?
Here is another quote from “Karamazov”
Иван Федорович вдруг повстречал одинокого пьяного, маленького ростом мужичонка…
= Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly met(perf.) a singular drunk small-statured “muzhichonko”.
So small is not already part of muzhichonko and I don’t think Ivan Fyodorovich is making a detailed observation of the man’s rank within the broader category of “drunken peasant”. It looks to me more like, here, as you are saying, an indication of insignificance/non-specificity/”no distinguishing marks”(apart from being drunk and small). Anyone who reads the complete sentence from which this excerpt is taken will enjoy another illustration of the author’s style.
Sorry: for “singular” read “solitary”.
suggesting that it is using “contemplate” in place of a Russian cognate that has a somewhat different valance.
Not even cognate; I would translate the word literally as “observe”. Gòogle suggests “behold” and “meditate”.
(The description does makes it sound a lot like meditation, but the word “meditation” in a lower-class 19th century context sounds utterly anachronistic.)
>>he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something.
>“he is not thinking; he is ‘contemplating’” makes perfect sense to me. Is this mental state so rare?
I think leaving out “something” makes a different sentence. Though still muddled for me.
Either way, I don’t recognize the distinction being made. Can someone explain the distinction they recognize here?
For me, while contemplating may reflect a distinct state, thinking is a broad category that subsumes it, and if you’re contemplating something, you’re thinking about it.
@ryan
I would offer a pragmatic distinction: someone who is contemplating the universe can do so with his/her eyes shut and may even be asleep (if you hear them snoring, this is even highly probable). Someone who is thinking about what card to play or what bet to make at the card table may look similar. But this is an illusion!
Contemplation is a type of thinking, which is why the translations don’t work, unless they are supposed to sound avant garde..
Meditating seems the closest in pure meaning to what was intended. It occurred to me immediately, but I figured (and January First-of-May confirms) that it would be in the wrong linguistic and cultural register. Observing fits the setting better, and it works as a form of mental activity that need not involve turning over conscious thoughts. I don’t lnow how well it matches the Russian meaning though.
But saying that “contemplating” is not “thinking” sounds naively like a translation error
I don’t think so. Thinking and contemplation are not the same thing. Although it’s true that thinking is part of the vita contemplativa, it’s the part that is the closest to the vita activa. As Hannah Arendt says in The Life of the Mind:
But the Contemplator is not modern, so when he is asked “What were you thinking about?”, he cannot answer, for he has not been thinking. As for the question of register, the meditation of the West is not the meditation of monks, which is a kind of prayer, and is right up Dostoyevsky’s alley.
We allow philosophers to define words for their own purposes, breaking normal usage, and within their works we accept these nonstandard usages. Yet even Arendt in her bespoke definition still encompasses contemplation within thinking, making it the summa.
“encompasses contemplation”
Contmplates contemplation within contemplation.
I guess this is not a question of philosophy, but of ordinary way of speaking. If someone says “soldiers are not walking, they are marching” would anyone object on the basis that marching is a form of walk?
Brett, созерцать is high style with strong religious overtones, but its Slavic root sozercat’ directly refers to seeing (zrenie “vision”).
@D.O.: It depends on where it goes from there. “Not thinking, but contemplating,” could work as a rhetorical device, but it does not work if it is followed by a further description of how the contemplator’s mind was so blank and empty of thoughts.
@LH, if you say that Bunin is a terrible stylist, I will object, of course (unless it is “terrible” as in “terrific”). But I will have to re-read D. to have my own opinion about his style.
I am curious because the particular line whose tranlsation is “terrible” in Russian is no worse than any random line. Say, “first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin” (a random line).
I wonder if the problem here has to do with Russian langauge itself. There is an issue with созерцать itself, and this sequence “looks as X, yet not X. but Y” is wrapped in Russian conjunctions. If they facilitate implementation of the “as if X but…” scheme, and the scheme itself is considered a flaw in English, it is interesting.
@LH, if you say that Bunin is a terrible stylist, I will object, of course
Good lord, no! My point was exactly the opposite: he wrote the best Russian prose I know, so I was using him as the “perfection” point on my yardstick. Dostoevsky’s style is wonderful for his purposes, but it’s not classic Russian prose style (which is one reason so many snooty stylists, like Nabokov, looked down their noses at him).
Apparently it was poorly constructed conditional:( It was as in: “If she wins tomorrow, I’ll eat my hat.” (an example from Wikipedia) and implied a hypothetical situation. If you did not reconstruct ” *you are saying…” here, based on my usual accent (that certainly includes mixing up simple and continuous forms in present) and what I wrote is incorrect or ambiguous, then my grammar sucks – and this time in theory too:(
Oh! No, the problem is not with your grammar but with the ambiguity of English grammar. Now that you explain what you meant, I can read it that way.
>@LH, if you say that Bunin is a terrible stylist, I will object, of course (unless it is “terrible” as in “terrific”).
I think you’re joking. Yet weirdly, just last night my daughters were watching the kids/tweens show “Just Add Magic”, in which the mother had inadvertently eaten a truth-brownie, and was giving her real opinions to all around her, while her daughter attempted to mollify them, inventing excuses including “terrible is the new slang word — it means terrific.”
Since no one asked, here is the sentence from Karamazov
—
Иван Федорович вдруг повстречал одинокого пьяного, маленького ростом мужичонка, в заплатанном зипунишке, шагавшего зигзагами, ворчавшего и бранившегося и вдруг бросавшего браниться и начинавшего сиплым пьяным голосом песню:
Ах поехал Ванька в Питер,
Я не буду его ждать!
= Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly met(perf.) a solitary drunk small-statured “muzhichonko”, in a patched “zipun” (=kaftan without a collar), zigzagging, grumbling and cursing, suddenly ceasing to curse and beginning [to sing] in a drunken gravelly voice a song:
Oh, Vanya went to Piter[sburg],
I won’t wait for him!
—
Whilst he may be having a game of seeing how many adjectives and gerunds he can stack before the sentence becomes unintelligible, and if he can get away with two “suddenly” in one sentence, it is hard for this reader to combat the impression that the author is ascribing his state of mind at the time of writing to the unfortunate peasant. Having said this, I would also not be surprised if the author was writing to deadlines imposed by sadistic editors and in desperate financial straits at the time of writing this. It is easy for Nabokov to scoff: if N ever needed money he probably could go to rich widows or the CIA ????.
Stop dissing Dost already. He was a fine writer. After a century of postmodenism people should already [EDIT: yes, this is the second already, I noticed it] learn that writing smoothly is not a pinnacle of writers craft. I don’t know how much Dost’s writing manner is a deliberate choice and how much of it is disinterest or inability to write more smoothly, but it clearly works for him and makes his novels better, not worse.
Who’s dissing Dost?
Hast dissed Dost?
None dast dis Dost!
PP dost.
When I first read Celine’s impure French it was a enormous thrill. Even the naturalists wrote in such a fussy way. And I can’t detect Balzac‘a literary sin, but more power to him!
I think that Dreiser probably did write badly. He was a German after all, and the editor of a fluffy women’s magazine. But On “Sister Carrie” this problem was not evident to me.
Well, let there be a compendium.
Dostoyevsky:
Garnett-12
Magarshack-58
Katzer-80
P-V-90
McDuff-93
Avsey-94
Ah, and
MacAndrew-70
I was not able to read them equally attentively, not to say with a fresh eye.
At the first glance, I seem to like Garnett and McDuff. McDuff is called excessively literal, he is not. He freely departs from what is usual modern English (…: depicted is a forest…), but he departs form the original just as freely. It looks more like he is following a rhythm of his own, induced by Russian. I do not mean that ces infidèles are belles, but they have a voice(or maybe Constance’s voice is the voice of her century?). Others are boring.
P.S. and why did McDuff and Avsey delete “saving soul”?
Wow, that’s incredibly helpful (and must have been a lot of work) — thanks! And yes, the omission of спасаться is odd; did their eyes just skip over it?
“What if Celtic was influenced by Phoenician?”
(It’s one of those “memes”.)
Explanation provided in the replies.
I became curious about the shoes that the peasant is wearing. What is “bast”? The dictionary sites say that it’s another term for phloem, but Wikip actually has a page for bast shoes.
Just out of curiosity, is “лапти” as obscure a phrase to modern Russians as “bast shoes” is to modern English speakers, or are the trappings of premodern peasant life a part of standard Russian education? And what does the suffix to the word actually used, “лаптишках”, mean? (GT gives “noodle shoes”??)
Actually, лапти is more familiar to me than “bast shoes,” but that’s because I spent so much time reading 19th-c. and regional Russian lit. I’d guess the word is fairly familiar to modern Russians from literature, proverbs, and what have you, even if they’ve never seen the actual objects, but I will wait to see what our Hattic Russians have to say.
Ah! лыко!!!! Only when I read Owlmirror’s “what is ‘bast’ ” (honestly even only when I read about “fiber” and “linden”) I remembered лыко:) Until then I was not able to guess “bast” from the context.
I use “лыко” much less often than “лапти”. I am familiar with the material, and I know what lapti are made from, but I do not make them. Thus I do need to name the shoe but hardly ever need to name the material.
I used to remember and occasionaly even use the word before maybe, but not now. I deal with pdf and words in foreign langauges more often than with our traditional crafts.
I love the expression лыка не вяжет.
@Owlmirror, in my generation at least everyone knows that lapti was traditional peasant footgear. A knight rides a horse. A peasant wears lapti.
It is also a symbol and a metaphor of authentic but poor rural Russian life. By 19th century the “high cultrue” was not very Russian, towns people just were not too numerous, while peasantry was (95% maybe).
So a Russian “peasant” is a bit like Arab “bedouin”. Add lapti to the same mental row where you keep “kilt” (which is not a dress of the poor, but likely about as famous and symbolic). There are other “traditional” types, of course. Cossacks in the south (who now use “Russians” to refer to people from central Russia though). Pomors in the north.*
The suffix is diminutve.
—
*And Old Believers in… various places. To where they ran.
@drasvi: Thanks!
Continuing the clothing examples, terms that I would also suggest as recognizable are “keffiyeh” and “djellaba” — I don’t remember from where, but I must have read descriptions of traditional Arab dress such that I recognize them even in isolation (although I did have to look them up to spell them correctly).
Forgive my naïveté, but is that supposed to be a marijuana cigarette; a “blunt” or “joint” or “doobie”, as the slang terms would have it? So the point of the image is thus this?
Start smoking: nothing
Smoke some more: wild linguistic speculation
Smoke even more: hungry
Smoke to the end: even more wild linguistic speculation (“What if Phoenician was influenced by Celtic?”)
Speaking of Semitic language linguistic twitter, I noticed this:
https://twitter.com/MayShaddel/status/1383733581063720969
everyone knows that lapti was traditional peasant footgear. A knight rides a horse. A peasant wears lapti.
This is essentially my impression as well.
I vaguely knew that лапти were woven together from some kind of wood-based strips, kind of like a shoe-shaped basket (and I probably occasionally wondered why didn’t it result in horrible splinters), but despite knowing that лыко, as in лыка не вяжет, is some kind of wood-bark-based material that is (judging by the proverb) presumably also woven, I somehow didn’t associate the two.
(Admittedly the existence of baskets, which would have been made from similar materials, probably confused this further.)
OTOH, if I ever knew the English word “bast” before (in any context other than the normally-capitalized Egyptian deity, anyway), I have probably forgotten it.
GT gives “noodle shoes”??
Noodles is лапша, which is close enough in sound, though I wouldn’t have expected GT of all things to confuse them. I wonder if the words are related somehow – though IIRC the “noodles” word is actually a loan from Central Asia somewhere.
OwlMirror: that’s exactly it. In other words, “you’d have to be stoned to think that.” “You’d have to be really, really stoned to think that.”
I somehow didn’t associate the two.
Me too. I imagine лыко as rather soft substance, and lapti look like something hard. So I am not sure they are made from lyko. Sigh.
And that is despite family business of one of branches of my family was making ropes from what we smoke🙁 P.S. or wait. No, it was flax.
-ишк- double diminutive, -ах prepositional plural (as used with “in”).
I had never heard of linen ropes… but not only does Wikipedia confirm they exist, it also explains that “line” as in “fishing line”, German Leine f., is from “linen” (G Leinen n.). What a lightbulb/facepalm moment.
And what does the suffix to the word actually used, “лаптишках”, mean?
It’s a diminutive/pejorative suffix: ‘dumb little лапти’ or the like.
be careful with “pejorative” (if in 19th century it was pejorative).
Cf. пальтишко было лёгкое на ней. (lyirics)
He, of course, does express doubts about its capacity to protect from cold (and maybe imlies rather simple look) but he is hardly “pejorative” to his weary woman whose chapped hands he is kissing.
But it is 20th century, when diminutives are already less common. Abundant diminutives applied to muzhiks likely (I am not a native*) do mean that the author thinks that he is “bigger’/”more powerful”, same way as I may think the same about myself and a farmer form Yemen. Or a prostitute from Bangladesh. (Or office workers in Russia)
And I of course can be really dumb both times.
—
* of 19th century!
GT gives “noodle shoes”
And also Прочность бочки – это термин, используемый производителями виски для описания виски, которое не было существенно разбавлено после его хранения в бочке для созревания. for
Cask strength (also known as barrel proof/barrel strength) is a term used by whiskey (also spelled whisky – viz., the Scots spell it whisky, while the Irish spell it whiskey) producers to describe a whiskey that has not been substantially diluted after its storage in a cask for maturation.
Прочность бочки my foot! my foot! бочковая крепость
It’s not Proto-Germanic, but a few people who had spent their childhood in a very warm climate were buried in Kent in the Late Bronze Age.
Yet even Arendt in her bespoke definition still encompasses contemplation within thinking, making it the summa.
I think that is also a fallacy. If you are crossing the lake to stand on the other side, then standing is the goal of swimming, but it is not encompassed in swimming.
Nelson Goering on July 11, 2020:
I happened to come across an example:
From p. 68 of this book. I’ve added || for where the file has whitespace that can’t be highlighted. The first line alliterates on ʔ (óteitr, i[ǫ]tunn, a[f]tr), the second as well (ár, e[kk]i), the third on v.
David Marjanović (July 7, 2020): “I’ve also read somewhere that the plough-as-opposed-to-ard is an Early Medieval innovation that spread, with the word, from Slavic.”
Are you sure you didn’t get that backwards? Most sources say the word went *from* Germanic *to* Slavic, and then from Slavic to Romanian and Albanian; see references at Wiktionary on Proto-Slavic *plùgъ.
I’m sure – but actually I like this third idea from the Wiktionary article best: “According to Schuster-Šewc [etymologist of Sorbian], the tool had spread from Raetia or Eastern Gallia into the Langobards and from them into the remaining Germanic and Central European people.” So it went from Germanic to Slavic, but wasn’t actually present in Proto-West-Germanic (let alone earlier).