I had occasion (I think because of the bizarre Finnish video I linked to here) to investigate the Finnish word koti ‘home,’ which led me back through successive etymological retreats to Proto-Uralic *kota, where I found the following Wortgeschichte:
Probably akin to Proto-Iranian *kátah (compare Avestan 𐬐𐬀𐬙𐬀 (kata, “house/home, pit”), Persian کده (kade, “house”)), in which case it is a loan in one direction or the other, but the direction is not entirely clear. Many researchers have supported an early loanword from pre-Indo-Iranian into Uralic, but this is not certain, as the Iranian word has no known cognates in Indo-European, not even Indo-Aryan. The similarity may simply be a coincidence.
Moreover, the root may have been a widespread Wanderwort across Eurasia; compare Abkhaz ақыҭа (akəta), Azerbaijani qutan (“(dialectal) dugout for lambs”), Proto-Mongolic *kotan (Mongolian хот (xot, “town”)), Turkish kodak (“(dialectal) home”), Ainu コタン (kotan, “village”), Japanese 鶏 (kutakake, kudakake, “rooster”, hybrid Ainu-Japanese word, literally “house rooster”), Tamil குடி (kuṭi, “house, abode, home, family, lineage, town, tenants”). Borrowings from Iranian (specifically Scythian) include Proto-Germanic *kutą, *kutǭ (whence English cot, Dutch kot, German Kate) and Proto-Slavic *xata (“house”).
Some of those Wörter would have had to do a lot of wandern (I know, that’s not good German, tut mir Leid), but it’s good to have all the possibilities laid out; we discussed Mongolian хот earlier this year. As for *xata, it is indissolubly linked in my mind with one of my favorite Russian sayings, моя хата с краю, я ничего не знаю.
Won’t someone think of the vowels?
They get all bent out of shape as they wander.
Bah. Proper protolanguages have no vowels. Vowels are for
earthlingsthe weak.Well, Proto-Germanic had no short **o, and indeed the Latin one got borrowed as *u pretty often; Proto-West-Caucasian only had two vowel phonemes (and while half the modern languages, including Abkhaz, have three, the third is an obvious addition from /a/ + various consonants because they have consonants to spare); the u~o variation elsewhere is less obvious, but that’s also the area where there’s k~q allophony ([k] with -RTR, [q] with +RTR), and [qu] will, if all else is equal, have a strong tendency to become [qo]…
However:
That way lies Chris Button in comments to LLog posts by Victor Mair.
Re “not good German,” the parallel-looking-to-English-participle “Wanderung” is not strictly speaking a participle, but OTOH the German present participle (here, “wandernd”) is as best as I recall not used in all contexts where English would use a present participle, at least not idiomatically. Wanderung, though, would probably be idiomatically correct as a loanword in hat’s sentence with a little tweaking of the verb.
Wanderung has never been a participle; it’s a straight-up noun meaning “hike”, “migration” and such. Integrating -ing into the verb system is an English innovation.
Really the only questionably idiomatic part is the “do”-support. Though even that is not unheard of.
Prescriptivists: “Tun” tut man nicht!
Response: “Tun” tut man nicht tun!
Do-support is due to Welsh influence, according to John McWhorter … (Cambriae est imperare Europae universae.)
That way lies Chris Button
Indeed.
So Hebrew kiton “small room (functioning as an apartment)” apparently came from Ancient Greek through Aramaic and Arabic, if you want some more wandering.
That is, Gr. κοιτών ‘bed-chamber’ < κοίτη ‘bed’ < PIE *ḱey- ‘to lie down’, or so I read.
(The Greek to Aramaic and Arabic occurred independently of the Hebrew.)
Wiktionary article for κοίτη (κοιτών is so rare it doesn’t have its own).
Maybe the more correct German for hat’s construction would be capital-W Wandern (as gerund) rather than lower-case wandernd (as present participle)? Since in English we use the present participle as a gerund I may not have been thinking about which role was syntactically appropriate.
Actually, I should supplement the prior comment with a note that the etymologists say that back in Anglo-Saxon times the gerund and present participle were distinct (with only the former cognate to the modern German VERB-ung) but then they subsequently became homophones and homographs. As will happen when formerly distinct inflectional forms have fused, we don’t necessarily think very often about which side of the pre-fusion distinction a given modern instance would have fallen on.
Hausa gida “house” …
(Haven’t come up with a Gur lookalike yet. Give me time …)
It may be rare, but according to The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, it occurs in Aristophanes, the LXX, the NT, Lucian and Dio, among others. In other words, writers that should be covered by any decent dictionary.
ome of those Wörter would have had to do a lot of wandern (I know, that’s not good German
Write it with a capital W and you’re fine.
*o substituted as *a or *u works for most things happening here, but one idea I’d like to know some more details for is a supposed “Scythian” preform for cot et co. If anything, we might even have simply a late Finnic loan into already Northwest Germanic, thus with trivial *o → *o. Kroonen’s PGmc dictionary has already a nod in this direction too: “Outside Germanic, it is difficult to dissociate the word from Fi. kota ‘hut, hovel’ (…) < PFU *kota”.
Distributionally Ainu (from where the Japanese is clearly borrowed from) seems to me the most suspicious of the bunch. Early Khitano–Mongolic could have been about in the right area to provide a link though, if we were willing to consider this either a Uralo–Mongolic cognate or coincidence rather than a Wanderwort. (Nothing compareable known in Yukaghir, alas.)
Phonologically the most jarring problem among the full set of maybaranda is surely retroflex ṭ in Tamil and rest of Dravidian (looks like to be reconstructible as common South Dravidian *kuṭ-), which pretty much rules out a late Northern Asian Wanderwort.
For “Scythians” I’d try “Alans”… is there something suitable in Ossetic…? But Finnic would obviously work fine.
I think we’ve discussed before that Scand. kote etc. “hut” doesn’t really fit with the cot set. The former could be a recentish borrowing from Finnish while the latter came earlier or from somewhere else.
For a native Germanic lookalike contestant, try hut.
And house, if you really want a headache. (It’s been proposed. It all makes sense in Yeniseian… if the Mongols introduced hutong to China, the Huns could have introduced house farther west… maybe.)
All that said, regional German Kate has a blatantly wrong vowel for any kind of *o. Unless it’s a misnativized borrowing from another dialect, maybe, I guess.
Oh, and… hut is a Kluge mess, so maybe there’s the -n found in Mongolic (where it’s a known and widespread suffix) and Turkic and Ainu.
And house, if you really want a headache. (It’s been proposed. It all makes sense in Yeniseian…
Where was this Yeniseian etymology for Germanic *hūsa- proposed?
In Turcological circles I have heard Ket quˀt get mentioned in connexion with the widespread Mongol loanword into Turkic of the general form kotan ‘sheepfold, cattle pen’, and a scantily attested Old Uyghur koto (q̈wtw ~ q̈wdw) ‘encampment, military camp’ (= Chinese 營 yíng), kotola- ‘to camp, encamp’.
From Elizaveta Kotorova and Andrey Nefedov (2015) Comprehensive Dictionary of Ket, vol. 1:
Cf. further in Dene-Yeniseian, Hupa xonta ‘house’ (as here). 🤪
But seriously, I wonder what the etymology of Hupa xonta ‘house (that exists now)’ might be. (Dene-internal? loanword from neighboring non-Dene languages?) It seems like one might be available from Sapir’s mentioning it in passing in discussion of words for ‘house’ here, bottom of page 105.
Looks like there might be some interesting discussion of the Ket form in Aulis Johannes Joki (1953) Die Lehnwörter des Sajansamojedischen ( = Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne, v. 103), p. 185–187, but I don’t have access to that now.
As a healthy corrective… Nupe kata ‘house’ (as here, p. 168).
Sal, ber, yon, rosh, kat…
It should be ‘tut mir leid’. The capital L is a painful reminder of a particularly dark episode in the history of German spelling.
Entschuldigen Sie, bitte!
I bet this is one of the long list of things the reform caved on in the last year or so, so that now both are permitted.