I was intrigued by Martin Haspelmath’s Facebook post:
What’s the most user-friendly corpus site? Maybe Abdulaev et al. (2022)’s corpus of the Dagestanian language Tsez (78 texts, almost 5000 text units, 2388 morphemes)? Which other corpus site is as user-friendly as this one? (Admittedly, it does not include sound.)
Since I presume I’m not the only one curious about Dagestanian languages, I thought I’d share The Tsez Annotated Corpus Project:
The texts that constitute this corpus were collected by Arsen Kurbanovič Abdulaev and Isa Kurbanovič Abdullaev and published with Russian translation as Abdulaev and Abdullaev (2010). The intended audience of this book publication was primarily the Tsez-speaking community and Russian-speaking readers interested in folklore. Work on the book was sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) and part of the agreement was that the institute would be allowed to post on-line a version of the text suitable for scientific use by linguists, with morpheme glosses and an English translation added to the materials available in the book.
The first text is Allahes ašuni: The rainbow; click through and you’ll see it is indeed beautifully presented. I presume esin šebi xecin šebi ‘What is to be said, what is to be left out’ is the local equivalent of Georgian იყო და არა იყო რა [iqo da ara iqo ra] ‘it was and it wasn’t’ and similar “once upon a time” formulas mentioned by me here and discussed later in the thread, beginning here.
Great site! But if he’s asking Which other corpus site is as user-friendly as this one?, I feel obliged to link to Pangloss.
Nice! And it’s got audio.
A pious cat!
(Kusaasi cats are more, uh, self-seeking. Much like European cats …)
Is “God’s Belt” standard Caucasian for “rainbow”?
Lameen, I enjoyed listening to it, but man, how did you decipher most of these words?
(I know, I know. Connected speech. Months and years of fieldwork.)
Are autotheists pious?
Is “God’s Belt” standard Caucasian for “rainbow”?
It’s “sky chameleon” in Kusaal, Mooré and Farefare, which seems so appropriate that I expected it to be pan-Oti-Volta, but to my surprise I see that it’s not even pan-Western Oti-Volta. “Sky knife” seems to be be the commonest single idiom in Oti-Volta (Mampruli, Mbelime …) Dyula has ala ka muru “God’s knife”, which is evidently out of the same conceptual box. A lightsabre …
Bisa has “sky chameleon” too: Bisa is Mande, and so unrelated to Kusaal, but the languages are neighbours, and lots of Bisa speak Mooré.
Hausa says bakan gizo “Spider’s Bow” because why not?
GPC implausibly suggests that Welsh enfys “rainbow” is something to do with bys “finger” etymologically. Via “ring”? Nah, can’t see it …
Chasing rainbows …
Tyinigi gonni “rain snake” in Dendi. That’s more like it.
“Chameleon bow” in Kassem.
In Arabic, the expression is extremely variable – I think Behnstedt and Woidich devote a few pages of their dialect atlas to it – but off the top of my head:
– Classical Arabic uses qaws quzaḥ “bow of Quzah”, who was apparently a pre-Islamic god, though I don’t think anything else is known about him; for this reason, Salafis sometimes prefer to substitute ṭayf “spectrum”.
– Maltese shows a different but similarly devout substitution: qawsalla “bow of God”.
– In Tabelbala (in Arabic and, by borrowing, in Korandje), the head is replaced instead, while the second element irregularly shifts to something more readily interpretable: zin-gdǝḥ “beauty of cup”.
– In Abadla, you get yet another irregular sound change, perhaps motivated by the iridescence you sometimes see on oily water: zit-gdǝḥ “oil of cup”.
– Finally, in Dellys we have ḥzam ǝl-ɣula “belt of the ogress”, using much the same metaphor as Tsez.
I like that Dendi rainbow serpent – he’s a long way from Australia!
Shilluk gives us another rainbow serpent:
ʊ́rɔ̂ŋ “rainbow”
ʊ́rɔ̂ŋ-ɔ̀ “huge mythical snake living in the Nile”
@de
I think the enfys part is telling what kind of bow the rainbow is; GPC has bwa’r cyfamod: bow of the covenant, rainbow, as well as bwa enfys. Covenant and ring sort of go together, although in the story it was an olive branch.
GPC implausibly suggests that Welsh enfys “rainbow” is something to do with bys “finger” etymologically.
Émile Ernault (1892) Glossaire moyen-breton under envez (in MSL 7, p. 207 here) says Whitley Stokes suggested this etymology to him. (Ernault later published the glossary as a separate volume, here.)
Joseph Loth (1911) ‘Notes étymologiques et lexicographiques’, Revue celtique no. 32, p. 301 (here) adds a little more. The reference there to Ovid, Metamorphoses, should be to book 12, line 321 (not line 231). For the curious:
However charming a notion of the rainbow considered as the amentum (see the video here around the 1:50 mark; Old Irish súainem) used for launching for the thunderbolt (conceived as a throwing weapon like a javelin, the way the rainbow was conceived as the bow of Indra in India) may be, it seems too far-fetched to be the real etymology. So I guess we are left with *‘something that the finger goes into’ > ‘finger-ring’ > ‘any ring in general, ferrule, anything curved, etc.’. I wonder if another example of this direction of semantic change can be found.
Thurneysen’s treatment of the Old Breton glosses that Loth mentions is here, and the manuscript Saint-Omer no. 666 with the gloss is here.
The “rainbow” meaning seems to be just in Welsh, which I suppose lends more credibility to the notion that it’s a secondary development from the amentum sense, which Loth cites in Middle Welsh too (though I think that in that citation it looks more like it means “ferrule, torque”, which is another actual sense of enfys.)
Sky woomera … celestial thong …
I see that Loth himself isn’t altogether convinced, though: “[Ernault] suppose que le gallois enfys, arc-en-ciel, pourrait avoir la même origine.”
“[God’s] torque” seems plausible enough in itself for “rainbow.” And suitably Celtic and all.
Dunno about the presumed etymological link with “finger”, though. A torque is nothing to do with fingers, and a ferrule, though finger-sized, is not actually something you put on your finger. But I suppose they are all annular, at any rate.
“(Finger-)ring” in Welsh is modrwy, where GPC tells me that the first element is from mawd, the earlier and original form of bawd “thumb”, and the second is rhwy “circle, ring.”
Huh. Morphic Resonance strikes again.
Today’s Financial Times crossword:
After castles in Spain, Charles needs weapons to secure fast fix (7,8)