Another in my occasional series featuring dubious statements about language by scholars in other fields: Nelson Goering posts on FB about a book on Vietnamese history he’s reading in which the author claims the Vietnamese word for water, nác/nước, derives from “one of the archaic Vietnamese terms for woman (nàng).” (This is in service of a point about “a possible Earth Mother cult,” which makes me sigh an entirely separate sigh.) Now, I know next to nothing about Vietnamese etymology, but I know enough to be skeptical about that, and sure enough, a quick visit to Wiktionary informed me that nước is “From Proto-Vietic *ɗaːk (‘water’), from Proto-Mon-Khmer *ɗaak (‘water’).” (If you’re curious about that archaic Vietnamese term for woman, nàng, it’s from Proto-Tai *naːŋᴬ ‘lady.’) I realize the Vietnamese word starts with n- and the protoforms with d-; I am assuming this is a regular or at least explicable development or it wouldn’t be stated with such assurance, but as I say, I am ignorant about Vietnamese etymology, so if there is reason to think Wiktionary is wrong (which, of course, it not infrequently is) and the historian is right, by all means let me know.
Seems to be yet another instance of the sadly familiar phenomenon of an otherwise well-educated person being totally unaware that scientific historical linguistics even exists.
Even so, it’s an odd one. I wonder if it’s actually a traditional Vietnamese folk etymology?
I’ve read of implosives “commonly” becoming nasals before. I find it hard to imagine, but I have very little experience with implosives…
(The context was Indo-Uralic comparison, and no examples were given for the assertion that the sound change is known elsewhere. Anyway, I find both the evidence used to support the idea that the PIE plain-voiced plosives were implosives and the evidence that they correspond to PU nasals quite a bit easier to explain in different ways – even within an IU framework.)
This combines two of my biggest gripes:
1. Non-linguists wading into a linguistic problem with all the humility and thoughtfulness of Ned Kelly entering a bank, and
2. Anthropologists or historians assuming that people in the past had no material or non-material culture that was not directly indicative of their deepest spiritual beliefs.
Double dipping pet peeves. Couldn’t be happier than I am right now.
[one of my biggest gripes] 2. Anthropologists or historians assuming that people in the past had no material or non-material culture that was not directly indicative of their deepest spiritual beliefs.
Not quite sure what you mean here.
Why anthropologists and historians in particular, why “people in the past” especially? Is there any human attribute or behavior that has not been subjected to merciless interpretation? As the outward sign of some deep spiritual thing or other ? By self-appointed interpreters not only of the indicated two kinds ?
This did not start with cigars. With less cognitive corrosiveness in the air, baseball might pass as an example of empty-headed enjoyment.
In the case of “water”, Vietnamese seems to be the sole language in the entire family to show an initial n reflex of proto-Mon-Khmer *ɗ:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Vietic/%C9%97a%CB%90k
However, “five” seems to be another example of the same outcome:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Vietic/%C9%97am
so maybe it is indeed regular, weird though it be.
Eastern Oti-Volta has quite a few cases of initial n for proto-Oti-Volta *d (and of m for *b), but in such cases the following vowel was always originally nasalised in POV, e.g. Nateni nɔ́ɔ̄kú “Parkia biglobosa tree”, beside e.g. Kusaal duan [dũ̀ã].*
(The same kind of thing seemed to be going on with Pozdniakov and Vydrin’s proto-Mande forms in that paper, which IIRC always reconstructed initial *ɓ *ɗ + nasalised vowel rather than initial *m *n.)
But as far as I can see, contrastive vowel nasalisation isn’t involved in these proto-Mon-Khmer reconstructions. Perhaps the path in Vietnamese was something like ɗ > l > n.
*The intermediate stage in the shift *d > n before nasal vowels in Eastern Oti-Volta was probably [l]: none of these languages has a contrast of /l/ vs /d/, and the written d in their standard orthographies seems to actually be realised [l] often, or even perhaps always. There’s a regional aversion to voiced plosives.
Ben Kiernan (author of the history book) didn’t make this “water < woman” thing up himself, he footnotes the whole paragraph to… let’s see if Google Books is going to be generous today… yes, it is! The Golden Serpent: How Humans Learned to Speak and Invent Culture by Huynh Sanh Thong, best known for translating Vietnamese poetry into English. Self-published — and considering that Huynh had taught at Yale, been director of Yale’s Southeast Asian Refugee Project, and published his translations with the Yale University Press, if he couldn’t get any publisher to take it, it must have been way out there.
Looks like the book is rare and not online as a whole, but somebody posted a few scanned pages on a blog: it opens with the discovery that woman, womb, and worm sound very similar, “Instead of arbitrary randomness, I suspected some structural principle at work here”, and goes on from there for 800 pages about ancient matriarchy and snake worship. Also, worship of Mother Nature, therefore French mer is derived from mère, just as English sea is derived from she, and German See from sie.
Ah! A mystery solved!
Western Oti-Volta lacks the root *ɲɪ- “water”, found not only in all the rest of Oti-Volta but commonly elsewhere in Volta-Congo to boot.
Instead, WOV has a quite unrelated root, seen in e.g. Mooré kòóm, stem kò-.
Hitherto, the origin of this root has been unknown, but I now realise, in the light of Prof Thông’s wisdom, that it is cognate to the root ka- of Kasem kaanɩ “woman.” It is clear that the speakers of proto-WOV worshipped a mother goddess associated with water, in contrast with their neighbours, who associated water with rain and the male sky-god.
It seems likely that the favour of this earth goddess was a material factor in the military conquests of the WOV-speaking Mossi-Dagomba states. (Compare Ishtar/Inanna, goddess of sex and fertility, and also of war.)
It is also surely not a coincidence that the Western Oti-Volta words for “snake”, e.g. Mooré wáafó, begin with wa-. (With the -fo element, compare fu “woman”, fu “womb” and fu “viper” in Chinese.)
And so I learn about Ned Kelly. Humility and thoughtfulness indeed.
I’d love to see his reaction to the fact that See “sea” is indeed a she, but See “lake” is a he.
Ferlus, “Histoire abrégée de l’évolution des consonnes initiales du vietnamien et du sino-vietnamien”, explains (p. 117): “Les préglottalisées ɓ ɗ ˀj sont spécifiques au PV et au PVM. Elles sont aujourd’hui représentées par les nasales m n nh avec des tons de la série haute. Le processus de transformation a dû être ɓ ɗ ˀj > ˀm ˀn ˀŋ > m n ŋ et les notations par les phonogrammes montrent clairement qu’aux XV-XVIe elles étaient déjà des nasales, glottalisées ou non.”
It does not reassure one regarding Ben Kiernan’s scholarly judgment that he is apparently unable to tell that this particular work of Thông’s is tripe. No actual knowledge of linguistics should be needed to see this, I would have thought, though of course it is immediately obvious to anybody with even the slightest acquaintance with either linguistics or ethnography.
Concerns about Kiernan’s judgment, especially regarding this particular book of his, seem to have been raised on other grounds by experts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Kiernan
it opens with the discovery that woman, womb, and worm sound very similar, “Instead of arbitrary randomness, I suspected some structural principle at work here”, and goes on from there for 800 pages about ancient matriarchy and snake worship. Also, worship of Mother Nature, therefore French mer is derived from mère, just as English sea is derived from she, and German See from sie.
O…. K. We see now the level of scholarship on display, and I regret having toned down my original wording (e.g., the phrase began as “ludicrous statements about language”) in an attempt at humility. “Be more Ned Kelly!” I should remind myself.
oy. i’m with MK, with an added pet peeve about the primeval-goddess-cult stuff, which always comes back to that nazi gimbutas.
But what you can do if you’re a monotheist or atheist and still like the idea of such a cult?
When I was a child I giggled at Soviet museums who subscribed numerous objects “a cultic object” when (as I thought) they didn’t know what it is.
“2. Anthropologists or historians assuming that people in the past had no material or non-material culture that was not directly indicative of their deepest spiritual beliefs.”
This is not the only example, and he’s prone to finding Significance of various kinds in language wherever he can. A little later, on p. 55, he says this:
“To this new home [in modern Vietnam] they brought their Cham language, which today still preserves its ancient word for “sunset,” meaning “sun plunge into sea,” a vivid memory of their former home on Borneo’s west coast.” (Cited from Ian W. Mabbett, “Buddhism in Champa”)
I haven’t looked into this, but my first thought is that someone could use expressions like “the sun was sinking” (an old expression in Germanic, cf. Gothic “þan gasaggq sauil”) to claim that English preserves an “ancient memory” of being on the west coast of the Black Sea or something (or the Baltic maybe, depending on what image you’re trying to conjure). Maybe the Champa phrase really is more specific in preserving a fossilized lexical item for “sea” in sunset (that actually would be interesting), but I’m more than a little skeptical, and figure the odds of getting any reward for following this one up are minimal.
His general working method, at least for linguistics and archaeology, seems to be to more or less repeat any interesting quote (he inserts many quotes into his running text) or factoid he’s come across. At least on the linguistic side, this leads to a bizarre (and I think sometimes outright contradictory, though I’m reading this book in a “snatch a couple of paragraphs while the toddler is playing with his toys” way, so I’m not always paying that much attention) mishmashes of what seem to be normal kinds of historical linguistics and rather unlikely claims (some of which I’d chalked up to Kiernan misunderstanding his sources, but now I’m not inclined to be even that generous). His footnote placement also makes it a bit unclear what’s coming from where sometimes, at least for the hurried reader. I’d actually thought this particular claim, about water and women, was uncited, but I guess I missed the attribution to Thong.
When I first read this, I’d vaguely wondered if there might be some kind of morphological process in early Vietic/Austroasiatic that might make the connections claimed by Kiernan seem at least superficially plausible (though of course not necessarily correct), or at least, with DE, if this might be a traditional folk etymology he’d picked up somewhere. I didn’t realize he was making use of such blatantly pseudoscientific sources.
When actual cognates include wheel/chakra and futile/God, it’s telling that the words these cranks claim to be related are never really that different. Where are the crackpots trying to say that “danger” derives from “Republican” or that “money” is an offshoot of “sadness?”
“woman, womb, and worm”.
Well… Thong is a translator of poetry and thus poet. Analogies and poets work with associations, and analogy could have played some role in phonological development of woman. The problem with analogy is that you can’t be sure it’s a factor.
“womb, and worm”
These remind me the odd Russian pair chrevo and cherv’ (“womb, belly” and ‘worm”). Wiktionary says PBS *ker-m- and *kirm-, the second is a well known IE root, but I don’t about the first.
“analogy could have played some role in phonological development of woman.”
Do you mean analogy from womb? That’s highly implausible, given that we have spellings like wummon already in Ancrene Wisse, at a time and place where womb would have been roughly wǭmbə. I think we can, actually, be sure such an analogy didn’t take place.
If you mean the possible analogical influence of the pseudo-umlaut in the plural in many dialects, that’s plausible — but of course that’s just normal analogy in the linguistic sense, which isn’t terribly similar to the analogies of poets (hence etymology not working at all like Thong seems to think).
Let’s say, when poets speculate about language, I don’t call it “pseudoscience”. What else they should speculate about? Sex? There is no shortage of specialists who study this, they too will object.
@NG, I didn’t mean any word in particular. I think this specific combination of contraction and rounding in “woman” is not predictable and expected. It well could be still wyfman or wyvman or anything else in modern English. How can one know for sure if other wo- or wu- words made it more attractive or convenient to speakers or if semantics of those played any role?
But why not womb. Co-lexification womb-mother is not uncommon in Europe, sometimes even womb-woman (even though I don’t associate words for women with words for wombs).
Don’t know about Gothic, but in German, sinken does not entail “into water”; dann versank die Sonne is probably out there somewhere… oh, als die Sonne versank is actually a Google suggestion.
(Die Sonne sank does not entail “all the way down”.)
When a speculation is presented as science and even the existing tests are ignored, I do call it pseudoscience; whether it comes from a poet or someone else doesn’t change that.
Examples?
I mean, “womb” in German is Gebärmutter, sure, but that’s a metaphor, not a colexification.
“contraction” – or assimilation and then contraction?
“Co-lexification” – or rather derivation as in matrix. But I think in some languages it’s co-lexification.
@DM, Thong’s formulation cited by ktschwarz is careful enough.
It should not be CITED as a scientific fact.
“Examples?” – I meant words similar to matrix, or Greek metra, thus not co-lexification.
But mátka (literary Russian “womb” literary Belarusian and Polish “mother”) could mean “mother” in some Russian varieties (and “womb” in Middle Polish and dialects says Wiktionary).
In many languages such words also can refer to dams, queen-bees, other-than-human mothers etc.
Breton mamm is 1. mother 2. female 3. womb. (Wiktionary in etymology of “womb” also mentions gwamm “woman, wife” but it is not the main word for these in textbook Breton)
I’m sure there are others.
The Kusaasi sun “falls” rather than “sinks.” Curiously, it doesn’t seem to “rise” at dawn; it just “appears.” However, by midday it has “germinated.” No doubt all this has profound anthropological and ethnohistorical significance. (It is clear, for example, that the ancestors of the Kusaasi must have had a liking for mixed metaphors.)
None of the Western Oti-Volta languages seems to derive “womb” from “mother” or “woman” (or vice versâ); for “womb” they use derivatives of the verb which appears in Kusaal as du’a “bear/beget.”
Pu’alim “femininity” (from pu’a “woman”) does appear in Kusaal for “female genitalia” (and similarly in Mooré), but that’s just a parallel formation to daalim “masculinity/male genitalia.” “I kneed him in the manhood.”
Hmph. GPC reckons that Welsh bru “womb” may be a loan from Irish. Well, I suppose, if we needed to borrow our word for “child” from Latin, why not? (Croth is the more usual word for “womb.” But that seems to be etymologically pretty opaque too.)
In a number of Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Akkadian) mercy and womb are same or similar (which does make some say that as men don’t have one, they also don’t have the other).
@de
Matasovič has:
—
*bruson- ‘abdomen, womb’ [Noun] GOID: OIr. bru [n f\ W: MW bru [m] ‘womb, belly’, bron [f] ‘breast’ BRET: OBret. bronn ‘breast’, MBret. and MoBret. bronn ‘breast, teat’ [f] CO: Co. bron ‘breast’ PIE: *b h rews- ‘belly’ (?)(IEW: 170f.)
*druto- ‘foolish, lewd’ [Adj] GOID: Mir. druth [o] ‘professional jester, fool’ W: MW drut (GPC drud) ‘dear, valiant, foolish, foolhardy’ GAUL: Truti-knos ‘Druti filius’ (Todi), Gallo-Latin *drudo- ‘dear’ > Fr. dru ETYM: W drud has an unexpected u, rather than i < PCelt. *u. Maybe it was influenced by Gallo-Latin *drudo- and its Romance reflexes, as Pokomy thinks.
—
Maybe instead of MW bru being a loan from OIr, there was a Gallo-Latin *brusu "belly, womb". There is a late Latin brutis "Latin speaking wife of a German soldier". However there is also an Old French bru/brut "daughter-in-law". This probably does not work either phonetically or semantically.
brusu
No, I don’t think that could work semantically at all, and I’m dubious about the phonology too.
French bru seems to be from Frankish, and cognate with “bride.”
Matasovič’ easy conflation of wombs and breasts strikes me as … daring.
Bron is “breast” in Welsh, not “belly” or “womb.” GPC attributes it to a Celtic *brusnā, alongside Old Irish bruinne from *brusni̯o-. Wiktionary actually links the latter with Welsh bryn “hill” too, and GPC concurs. (Hadn’t occurred to me before, but it makes sense once it’s been pointed out, I suppose.)
“Womb” itself is of course from Old English wamb “belly.” Kusaal has the same sort of shift: unless you’re being particularly Anatomically Correct or pedantically medical, you just say pʋʋg “belly” for a woman’s uterus. (In Kusaal, it’s used metonymically for “pregnancy” too.)
“I don’t think that could work semantically at all” – “At all” can be an exaggeration: “womb” is used in the Bible in the sense “woman”. The example in wiktionary is about [slave]girls qua spoils of war, and I’m not in the mood to check other contexts. The meaning marked as “Biblical Hebrew” and “poetic”.
Moro optimistically, cf. Romanian word for “man”:)
Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s Wikipedia page says “In accordance with Vietnamese custom, this person should be referred to by the given name, Thông”, and consistently does that (as seen here in 2005 at VIETNAMESE NAMES). On the other hand, Yale’s obituary says “Huynh dedicated much of his life to bringing the achievements of Vietnamese literature and culture to Western audiences” and so on, and Kiernan’s footnote is to “Huynh, Golden Serpent, 9–25”, so I tentatively went with that.
Let’s see: Chicago (2024, probably same in previous editions) says: “Since Vietnamese persons are usually referred to by the last part of their given names (Premier Diem, General Giap), they are best indexed under that form.” The Oxford Guide to Style (2002) says the same, also with the example of General Giap.
However … they were Vietnamese, but Huỳnh Sanh Thông was Vietnamese-American. He became an American citizen and wrote in English. The Library of Congress catalog has him as “Huỳnh, Sanh Thông”; I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that would have come from the publishers, and I think (again, correct me if I’m wrong) publishers wouldn’t do something ridiculous to their author’s name. So I’d come down on the side of referring to him as “Huỳnh” as the author of a book written in English, and likewise in the bibliography.
(Why Kiernan’s bibliography spells the author’s name with diacritics on first reference, but “Huynh” without diacritics on second and subsequent references, is a question for Kiernan and his OUP copyeditors. The diacritics are there on the book cover.)
If I were to follow the Way of Thông (or Huỳnh), I would of course link Kusaal pʋ̄ʋg “uterus” (stem pʋ̀-) with pū’a “woman.” (In some old compounds, the stem form of “woman”, usually pù’a-, actually has got worn down to pʋ̀-, e.g. in pʋ̀kɔ̄ɔnr “widow”; compare dàkɔ̄ɔnr “bachelor, widower, unmarried man”, and dāu “man.”)
[Pay no attention to the fact that pʋ̄ʋg does not actually have the core meaning “uterus”, or the Goddess will be angry.]
Proto-Oti-Volta *pó(g)-wá “woman” actually is a bit of a mystery. It doesn’t seem to have any cognates outside the group; Kasem kaanɩ (stem ka-) probably does represent an older, much more widespread, root for “woman.”
It’s not from “womb”, though.
“800 pages about ancient matriarchy and snake worship”
1. Eve
2. Medusa Gorgon
3. “Every woman must have a snake!” – a song by БГ, a musician of piercing spiritual vision.
(У каждой женщины должна быть змея)
I was going to say “bride”, but the t of German Braut comes from the High German Consonant Shift (late 6th century), and the original d is preserved in bride as expected. So that doesn’t work.
…though that’s “bearded”, not just “beard”.
Pudgy by way of Scandi-Congo.
I’m not sure we have enough data to fully sketch out the semantic range of Gothic sigqan*, but I don’t think that would bother the kinds of people who’d want to make hay out of sinking suns.
@dm
Dariusz R. Piwowarczyk, “A Note on the Etymology of Brūtes/Brūtis ‘a (Latin-Speaking?) Bride’”
Classica Cracoviensia
vol. XXVII (2024), pp. 377–387
https://journals.akademicka.pl/cc/article/download/6182/5745
Well, technically Blackbeard, Barbe-Bleue, Barbarossas and Langobards are synecdoches and various Abu Lihyas are not. Different derivation, but is the meaning different from “The Red-bearded” etc?
@DM:
To be fair, there’s not a lot in the way of potential cognates for POV *dà-wá “man” either, except for Miyobe ù-lā “husband” (I’m pretty sure that Miyobe is Oti-Volta’s closest relative, and the *d/l correspondence is apparently regular.)
[The Kasem word for “man” is baarʋ, which is obviously the source of the Romanian word. The Kasem dictionary illustrates the word with what seems to be a picture of Nelson Mandela, looking suitably Manly.]
On the other hand, POV nîd-wá “person” seems to go way back. Maybe even North Atlantic cognates (cf Fulfulde neɗɗo “person”, though one problem with this is that the *d of the POV form may be derivational or epenthetic rather than part of the actual root.)
Thanks, have downloaded, will read!
…speaking of which… the sun rising & setting in German is aufgehen & untergehen, and the latter is what’s used for sinking ships and not much else (the world does it when it ends, empires do it when they fall…).
And there is Romanian femeie “woman” (from family, not from femina or femella), analogous to “beard” rather than “bearded”… (I wonder why such shifts for both words)
Oh, fascinating.
untergehen …. the world does it when it ends, empires do it when they fall…
as in Spengler, “Der Untergang des Abendlandes”
In Swahili (at least among the actual Muslim Swahili themselves) you don’t ask a man “how is your wife?”, even if you know that she’s been ill; instead, you’d ask “how is the family?”
No idea if a similar thing obtained in traditional Romanian society, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
No such tabus among the Kusaasi; the only way you could really offend somebody with such questions would be by not going on long enough: “How are you? How did you sleep? How’s the work? How are the wives? How are the children? How are your siblings? How are the in-laws? How are the grandparents? How are the grandchildren? How are your aunts? How are your uncles? How are your cousins? How are your nephews and nieces? How is the hamster? …”
(The only linguistic trap is that every answer has to be “fine!” Only once you’ve got the greetings finished can you say that your hamster [or aunt, as the case may be] has, unfortunately, just been eaten by a hippopotamus [or by Freddie Starr, as the case may be.])
https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/e28098freddie-starr-ate-my-hamster-crowned-the-suns-most-iconic-cover-14939
My friend’s* girlfriend’s** brother’s wife***’s uncle has been eaten by a crocodile.
* not sure if ‘s can work in chains**** or I need “of” here.
** perhaps ex. And in Russian it is девушка, “[his] girl, young woman” so repetition of words is avoided.
***Ethiopian
****if it can, then my teacher can say “my student’s freind’s girlfriend’s…” and so on.
Chain ’s’s as much as you like. Anthropologists and linguists use these chained esses all the time to describe complex family relationships (“the word for ‘mother’s father’s mother’ is the same as that for ‘father’s father’s mother’,” like that.)
Sorry about the uncle.