I recently came upon the Wiktionary page Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/tewk- and was struck by the wide semantic divergence involved. The reconstructed meaning is ‘germ, seed, sprout, offspring’ (presumably based on Indo-Iranian *táwkma), but it gives rise to Proto-Germanic *þeuhą ‘thigh’ (see there for further descendants), Proto-Slavic *tȗkъ ‘fat, lard’ (see there for further descendants, including Russian тук ‘fertilizer’), Ossetian тог/туг (tog/tug) ‘blood,’ Irish tón ‘anus’ (whence Pogue Mahone), and Latin tuccetum ‘a kind of sausage made with meat of ox’ (whence Spanish tocino ‘bacon; salt pork’), among many others. Does this seem like trying to cram too much into one word family?
This seems to be based on the dubious proposition that PIE was a language devoid of homophones. Unlikely a priori.
Welsh tin “arse” by the way; the proto-Celtic *tūknā supposedly underlying this and the Irish tón is flagged as dubious in GPC.
In reality, of course, most of these words are clearly loaned from the Mooré tʋ́kò “nest.”* (What? You think that’s actually less likely than some of these proposals?)
* Actually a very problematic etymon in Oti-Volta. The root is probably ultimately that seen in Kusaal tɛ “build a nest”, but synchronically the stem of Mooré tʋ́kò is tʋ́go-; it seems to have not only picked up its final g by resegmentation from the noun class suffix but also undergone vowel assimilation to the suffix. Perhaps it’s really a loan from PIE …
Georges translates tuccetum as “eine im zisalp. Gallien übliche Art Rollfleisch”, so it looks like a (Celtic?) loanword. De Vaan didn’t include it in his etymological dictionary, so he apparently also considers it a loanword (he explicitly excludes loanwords).
This seems to be based on the dubious proposition that PIE was a language devoid of homophones.
My thought exactly.
tʋ́g-, not tʋ́go-, sorry.
Proud to say that the first element of “Pogue Mahone” is a loan from Latin via Brythonic, as with much ecclesiastical vocabulary.
What shows that it had a Brythonic link?
Wiktionary takes it straight from Latin.
… and Latin tuccetum ‘a kind of sausage made with meat of ox’ (whence Spanish tocino ‘bacon; salt pork’), among many others.
This “among others” will surely include Stanley Tucci himself, who loves his prosciutto.
Tucci co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the 1996 film Big Night, in which the plot seems to be mostly an excuse to show food and cooking.
@de
In Celtic, clearly a Semitic loanword (compare Hebrew תַּחַת = tákhat, “buttocks”).
@hat
I think most of your daughters could be covered by two semantic shifts from an original “swelling”:
Swelling > arse > thigh > fat, meat product made from arse or thigh
Swelling > bud > seed > blood, fertiliser
What shows that it had a Brythonic link?
The vowel, and the /g/. Also, Thurneysen says so, IIRC.
It’s from [osculum] pacis, specifically.
If it were straight from Latin it would be something like *páich (if not *cáich.)
Wiktionary does say “via Brythonic.”
Indeed, 2LIV seems to break the verbal forms of the underlying roots up here three ways:
*tek̑- ‘zeugen, gebären’ [beget, bear] IEW 1057, p. 618
1. *teu̯k- ‘stoßen, schlagen’ [punch, hit] IEW 1032, p. 640
?2. *teu̯k- ‘stark/fett werden, schwellen’ [become strong/fat, swell] IEW 1081, p. 641 (with a note to compare a parallel root *teu̯h₂- ‘schwellen, stark werden’)
I was just compiling a mental list of actual known implausible semantic shifts in English.
Nice: “ignorant” to “precise” to “pleasant.”
Virtue: “manly vigour” to “(usually female) sexual restraint.”
Cattle: “cranial” to “cows”
Ingenuity: “artlessness” to “cleverness”
All of these would rightly elicit mockery in an Afro-Asiatic comparative dictionary …
Sure, but the transition from “implausible semantic shifts occur” to “therefore this particular alleged implausible semantic shift must be accepted” is streng verboten. That said, PlasticPaddy’s suggestions make sense.
Sure. Implausible semantic shifts can’t ever be assumed, even though they actually do happen sometimes. I really would reject a proposed etymology equating any of the pairs I cited – unless the diachronic stages were documented, and/or plausible intermediate steps could themselves be reliably reconstructed.
Sometimes, of course, extralinguistic cultural information helps. The link “cowry/money” is pretty implausible out of historical context. It wouldn’t at all pass muster to say “perhaps cowries were used as a means of exchange”, without any evidence that this had actually happened.
The pairing of Kusaal pid “put shoes on” and Mooré piidi “take shoes off”, looks pretty fishy until you discover the evidence that in Western Oti-Volta, the proto-Oti-Volta “reversive” suffix regularly sufaces as zero because of historical sound changes. Otherwise you’re deep in lucus a non lucendo territory.
Come to that “peace”/”kiss” really wouldn’t do at all, if we didn’t actually know the relevant cultural background.
The trouble with positing culturally-logical semantic shifts in things like Afro-Asiatic or even Indo-European, of course, is that the relevant protocultures are actually more speculative than the protolanguages …
And a semantic shift that seems vaguely plausible to us may actually only seem so in the light of our own cultural preconceptions. Quite a few metaphorical uses of everyday words which are very common in Europe are completely absent in Oti-Volta – and vice versa.
Bead and clean are good ones.
Lucus, BTW, a lucendo – it just somehow shifted from “clearing in a forest” to “forest”, or so I once read.
…where “bear” means specifically “give birth”, not “be pregnant”, let alone “carry”.
I immediately thought Bulgarian “тучен” is probably derived from it, and I was not wrong https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%82%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD#Bulgarian
from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/tu%C4%8D%D1%8Cn%D1%8A
I was just compiling a mental list of actual known implausible semantic shifts in English.
Three of my favorites are red:
Cardinal: “hinge” to “important” to “high-ranking cleric who wears red robes” to “red bird”
Crimson: “worm” to “a kind of scale insect” to “bright red”. See also “vermillion”.
Miniature: “red lead” to “small painting” to “very small, scaled down” (influenced by similar-sounding Latin words meaning “less” etc.)
I always like to mention brand, because it has a long, meandering train of meanings, from “burning stick” to “intangibles associated with something,” with all the intermediates still in common use. Charge is a word with even more meanings, forming a complicated, branching evolutionary tree, although some of the nodes are extinct.
You may have read it right here: Giacomo Ponzetto said “lucus was originally the sacrificial glade within a forest where sunlight did penetrate.”
The history of the phrase was discussed by Laudator Temporis Acti. Wiktionary — and the OED, in an entry from 1976 — falsely attribute it to Quintilian; as Laudator says, Quintilian didn’t use the phrase, in fact he mocked the idea (etiamne a contrariis aliqua sinemus trahi, ut “lucus” quia umbra opacus parum luceat). The phrase did appear, apparently sincerely, in Servius’s commentary on the Aeneid, which was included in early modern editions of Virgil.
Quintilian also mocked the idea that homo was related to humus, but that’s what we believe today.
I’m pretty sure I read it earlier than last year.
He was wrong for the right reasons – he had no way to account for the different root vowels.
At least if following the common model there of simply assuming a flexible proto-meaning, from which reflexes diverge, instead of asking for it to be evidenced anywhere first.
No need to go especially deep for this to be an iffy method, either; I was just reading the late Ehret’s paper on extending East Cushitic reconstruction, where we find many ingeniously bridged comparisons such as Sidamo shummo ‘afterbirth; white of egg’ ~ Somali dhuun /ɖuun/ ‘very sour milk; pus’, clearly to be derived from a *jʼumm- ‘viscous fluid’; or Afar gaax- /gaaɖ/ ‘to guard, protect’ ~ Dullay ɠaaɗ- ‘to thank’, clearly to be derived from a *ɠaaɗ- ‘to observe’…
Afar gaax- /gaaɖ/ ‘to guard, protect’
A transparent loan from Kusaal gu’ud “guard” (noun.)
The English word itself is, likewise, borrowed from Kusaal, via a non-rhotic dialect, with the /r/ introduced elsewhere by analogy with “incredible.”
Whereas Dullay ɠaaɗ- ‘to thank’ is clearly borrowed from Hausa gōdḕ “thank.”