Some of you will remember Alexander Kim’s earlier site (see this LH post); I am glad to report he is planning to move the archives to his new site, Sarkoboros, about which he says (on the About page):
I’m a researcher in David Reich’s lab at Harvard’s Department of Genetics who seeks to better understand the human past through ancient and modern genomes and their dialogue with archaeology, historical biogeography, linguistics, physical anthropology, ethnography, and other disciplines. My interests range widely through evolution, ecology, and history.
I wish him the best and look forward to seeing more such interesting posts as Helimski: Early European Avars were (in part) Tungusic speakers; I’m adding the URL to my RSS feed.
Update (Aug. 2019). The site is now dead as a doornail.
Awesomeness.
David, I will take your word for it. I looked at the article but was defeated by the technicalities. Definitely aimed at geneticians and no one else.
Helimski’s article claiming Manchu-Tungusic origin of Avar language gives
“MT etymology for the Slavic designation of nobility (Boyar as the plural form to Bayan/Boyan, the name of the famous Khaghan of the Avars).”
Now, this is simply wonderful!
I wonder about the origin of “Sarkoboros”. It reminds me of “sarcophagus” and “Ouroboros”, but I can’t go beyond that.
Bayan/Boyan, the name of the famous Khaghan of the Avars
Also the name of the bard mentioned in the opening strophes of the Igor-Tale.
Re: bayan. It’s also a Russian-style accordion. So what?
Tale of Igor’s Host goes pretty deep into history mentioning emperor Trajan’s times, for instance.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the author was indeed referring to Avar Khagan Bayan. (the only other Russian source dealing with Avars was Nestor’s Chronicle which mentions Avar habit of riding carriages pulled by Slavic girls and provides a Slavic saying “melted away like Avars” in reference to their sudden and complete disappearance)
I wonder about the origin of “Sarkoboros”. It reminds me of “sarcophagus” and “Ouroboros”, but I can’t go beyond that.
I asked Alexander, who says: “You basically have it! It’s from σαρκοβόρος, ‘flesh-eating’.”
Thanks LH, I knew “sarko” but not “boros”. Now I remember that Ouroboros was the snake that “eats its tail”. Whatever Alexander means by the name!
His most recent entry compares three legends of little people leaving underground, and destroyed when the narrator’s ancestors set their caves on fire.
Wouldn’t it be a relatively common recurrent motif in fairy tales and legends? What do the folklorists among us know?
Dwarfs underground and in the caves are pretty common in the legends otherwise, and their massacres, too. I instantly recall the Galloway Legend of Heather Ale, where Stevenson tells of a Scottish king slaying the little people.
Still a popular name today – I had a classmate named Bojan.
Which article?
Which article indeed! I must have been half-asleep when I made the comment, even though it was mid-morning!
Looking back at the website, I see that the one I tried to read was about genomic studies in the Pacific Northwest, which of course is about genetics not linguistics. I think that what happened is that the link to Helimski leads to the abstract only, so that I tried exploring the Sarkoboros site and found the Genome article, which I started to read since I am interested in most things about the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it was late at night! Then when I got back here the next day or two I obviously got confused.
The site seems to have vanished – I’m getting “page not found” responses for a while now. Does any of the Hatters know what’s happened to the site?
I’ve written the guy who ran the site to ask; I’ll report back if I hear from him.
Danke!
Just heard from him; he says he expects to be resuming the blog, probably at the same URL. If he updates me, I’ll update you.
Thanks for letting us know!
While doing a google search today, I noted that the blog is up and running again, now at a .net address: http://sarkoboros.net/
Re: bayan. It’s also a Russian-style accordion. So what?
IIRC, the accordion was named for the Igor’s Campaign character. (Don’t think the Avar ruler was involved at any point.)
(Ironically enough, at some point in the mid-2000s the word boyan – with an O again, as a deliberately misspelled version of the accordion – became Russian internet slang for “stale joke”. Though, like the rest of the so-called “Olbanian” misspellings, it’s not used as much today.)
The -boros in {ouro,sarko}boros is cognate with Latinate -vore, as in {carni,herbi}vore.
Huh, how can that be? Oh, PIE *gwora- “food, devooring”, says Etymonline.
Still, an odd-looking etymon. Assuming the -a- is a laryngeal-coloured stem vowel, the rest could be an o-grade of something. *gWerh2‑ “favour” in the o-grade with perfective meaning “what’s been favoured/craved for”, and then a derived action and/or agent noun?
Yes, I was in haste and shoved under the rug the matter of grade.
The ‘devour, eat up’ root is *gʷerh₃-; it forms a root aorist and one of those characteristic zero-grade presents which, if memory serves me right, our gracious Host studied once upon a time — the *gʷr̥h₃-é/ó- type (Ved. giráti, OSC žьrǫ). Greek, however, shows an independently derived reduplicated present *gʷi-gʷr̥h₃-sḱe/o- > βιβρώσκω.
The compositional agent noun *-gʷorh₃-o- is productively generated by the same derivational template that gives us the adjective βορός ‘gluttonous’, cf. Ved. aja-gará- ‘goat-devouring’ (or shall I say ‘caprivorous’?). These Graeco-Latin compounds are occasionally imitated in Polish zoological nomenclature with the help of -żer (from the verb żreć ‘devour’, descended from the same root), e.g. małpożer ‘Philippine eagle’ (literally, ‘monkey-eater’).
one of those characteristic zero-grade presents which, if memory serves me right, our gracious Host studied once upon a time
What a memory! Yes, somewhere in my cellar there is a moldering stack of yellowed paper full of speculations about zero-grade thematic presents annotated by Warren Cowgill. After all these years I can think of it without shuddering…
Alas, Sarkoboros is no more, whether at .com or .net.