It is very tempting to unify *pəñu: "sea turtle" with *pəNuʔ: "to fill, full, container". And *pəNuʔ: "full" has potential cognates in the possible Sino-Austronesian macrofamily/Southeast Asian historic sprachbund.
And then at that point you're speculating a link between "green …
Turtledoves are not named after turtles, in fact "turtle" has meant the bird for longer than it meant the reptile.
In Middle English tortu meant "turtle" (from Latin tortuca) and turtel mean "turtledove" (from Latin turtur), then they collapsed into "turtle". The modern meaning of "turtle" won out, and …
A Mediterranean/Caucasian substrate word approximately like *wion: "violet (flower)", was borrowed into Hellenic, Iranian, and Italic.
Greek Ionia is probably not related, since the Mycenaean shows 𐀂𐀊𐀺𐀚 i-ja-wo-ne for "Ionians" with digamma in a different position than the *wion expected for "violet" , and Egyptian 𓇌𓅱𓈖𓏭𓉻𓂝𓏛ywnj-ꜥꜣ supports that.
Here I'm following Blažek's compelling argument (2017) to derive *h₂ŕ̥Tk̑os from *h₂r̥dh₂éḱh₃-s: "bee-eater", similar to many later words for bear that mean things like "honey eater", "honey pig", "thief of bees", "bee bear", "bee wolf", … . This instead of the traditional connection …
The PIE word *yóh₁r̥: "year" becomes both the native English "year" and also the Latinate "hour". Fascinatingly, Greek ὥρᾱhṓrā (whence the Latin) is also borrowed, post-Alexander, into Classical Sanskrit along with the Hellenistic-Babylonian astronomy/astrology, eventually giving such descendants as Thai โหรhǒon: "astrologer, prophet, magician"!
I've been thinking about herons and egrets a lot recently. For the past year or so, our morning walk goes by a half mile of drainage ditch with an amazing variety of water birds. We regularly see 4 different species of heron: great blue heron, great egret, snowy egret …
I had a lot of fun playing Supergiant Games's Hades recently, so I put together a run down of word family information for the names in the game, organized according to the in-game Codex! (Minus the Fables section, which is more spoiler-y and generally less etymologically interesting.)
The period of unseasonably hot weather after an initial autumn cooling—now often called "Indian summer"—was previously called "goose summer" in English because it corresponds with the beginning of goose hunting season. Compare Irish fómhar beag na ngéanna: "warm period in Autumn (Indian summer)", literally "little autumn of …
While *linom: "flax" and *līnom: "flax" obviously must be connected in some way, the difference in vowel length cannot be reconciled by any regular changes.
All versions with the long vowel are plausibly attributable to derivation from Latin līnum. All the short vowel versions could theoretically be from Greek …
*ḱel-: "to lean", which gives us *ḱlew-: "to hear". The connection is most explicit in *h₂eus-ḱl̥teh₂ye-ti, literally: "leans an ear", which gives Latin auscultō: "I listen, I hear, I heed, I obey".
The colors white, gold, yellow, yellow-green, green, sky blue, and navy blue in various languages. And the chemical elements chlorine, gold and arsenic in English.
Proper Freedom for our Friends this Friday (Juneteenth). ✊🏿✊🏽✊🏼
And perhaps more importantly, proper freedom even for those who are not our friends. Which is in contrast to the ancient, but all too modern, semantic connection where only those we like get to be free.
This is quite a large family with a number of borrowings into other language families. Because, it turns out, the Indo-European speakers' relationship with wheels is pretty important in a lot of people's history, like the Sumerians' relationship with reeds.
Celtic, Greek, and Latin each have words for "island" that involve /n/ and /s/ and cannot be completely explained. One possibility is that they are all borrowings from the same non-Indo-European source.
Even if those three are all connected, it would still be beyond credibility for Malayo-Polynesian *nusa …
I'm working on a series of "sorceror", "magician", "wizard", etc. But I had to move up warlock: "oathbreaker, truth-liar".
It is the confluence of two families: "truth" and "lies".
It has long been noted that the Ancient Greek λέωνléon: "lion" (whence the word for lion in nearly all Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Italic languages, as well as a few others) looks almost like it comes from Semitic *labu, but not quite. Pre-Classical Greek would be expect …
There's a very cool fact: cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, kohlrabi, and others are all the species of plant, namely Brassica oleracea, selectively bred for different parts of the plant. (https://www.google.com/search?q=brassica+oleracea+selection)
A few weeks ago, I picked up my phone to look up the etymology of "Pontic", but got distracted and looked up the etymology of "path" first. And it turned out they were the same! But wait, how does that work, cause Grimm's Law?
(Tegurala introduction: I have a D&D setting I have developed, which I call Tegurala. When I started working on it, I decided to use real world languages for the fantasy languages, for naming language consistency without having to create a bunch of new ConLangs. Giants use Uralic languages)
Proto-Indo-European has *gʷṓws: "cow, cattle" and *woḱéh₂: "(female) cow". The expected feminine of the *gʷṓws would be something like **gʷow(s)éh₂. *woḱéh₂ looks similar, but not quite there.
Sino-Tibetan *ŋwa: "cattle, ox" is also highly reminiscent of *gʷṓws …
I present two families for "pig" here, partly because Armenian խոզxoz is derivable from either family (see footnote [1])
Family 1, Indo-European *suH-pig, sow?", possibly related to Akkadian 𒊺𒄷𒌑še-hu-u₂ and Sumerian 𒋚šah; and family 2, Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰóryos: "pig", probably central PIE dialect (Greek …
I get a little speculative here, if not downright provocative. There are words for dog all over Eurasia that recall each other. These could be onomatopoeic, but they do not much resemble the common forms you find in words that actually used as dog sound …
The Greek and Armenian words are often interpreted as being from a Mediterranean substrate word. But then there's the Slavic *lȏjь: "tallow, suet". And then the Old Chinese lɯw: "oil, grease", which is plausibly from the Tocharian equivalent of …
Pterodactyl. Two cool realizations about Greek "pter-". 1) "Helicopter" is so strongly segmented as "heli-copter" in English, it's fun to realize that the Greek construction is actually "helico-pter": "twisting (helix) wing". 2) More recently I realized it's an awesome example of Grimm's Law: apply …
Ankylosaurus! And as an unexpected bonus, I found Azhdarchid pterosaurs deep in the family, too. Pterosaurs are probably my very favorite Mesozoic animals (stay tuned for next week!). Also in this family: various spiders and snakes and fears and sins in various languages.
This is the 100th Word Family Friday in 100 weeks, and the last before I take a break for a few weeks to work on infrastructure and pad my buffer. I originally had a different idea, but then I realized I of course had …
*ksweyb- is a _very_ weird root. It has too many consonant, and way too many in the onset. It has a /*b/ which is an unusual/marginal phoneme in PIE. It is related to a number of …
"My language is my awakening, my language is the window to my soul."
I have a D&D setting I have developed, which I call Tegurala. When I started working on it, I decided to use real world languages for the fantasy languages, for naming language …
I was preparing a family this week that I thought included the English word wall. But as I researched it, I found that Germanic *waigaz: "wall" connects to that family, but English "wall" is from the unrelated Germanic *wallą from Latin vallum: "wall, rampart".
In my undergraduate Early Medieval Europe class at university, one of the assignments was a fictional source document. I wrote a piece of a fictional Visigothic epic about the Battle of Adrianople that had been preserved in a Spanish monastery.
Apologies for the sketchy nature. This one exploded on me in several different ways.
Prior to working on this family, I knew that "ambassador"/"embassy" was from Gaulish via Latin, and I had connected that to the story Livy tells about the Battle of …
June's theme is linguistic effects of the Celtic Hegemony of the early Iron Age. The rest of the month will focus on words that were borrowed from Gaulish into Latin (things like very iconic Latin word gladius being borrowed from Gaulish, which appears in …
Proto-Indo-European *h₂éwis: "bird" and Proto-Indo-European *h₂ówis: "sheep" appear to be umlaut variants, presumably through the more sparsely attested root *h₂ew-: "to put on clothes, to cover". *h₂éwis: "bird" would be from a passive participle, "a clothed (in feathers)". *h₂ówis: "sheep" from an active participle …
In English, constituent question words are often called wh-words: what, when, where, which, why, whether. All these are spelled with a w and pronounced with a w (the h is pronounced in some dialects and not others). This is not coincidence.
The primary interrogative particle in Proto-Indo-European is *k …
Summary: While the alliance of US states to particular parties fluctuates, regional voting blocks are much more persistent. The primary regional voting blocks are Union North vs. Confederate South and Urban East vs. Rural West.
Germanic really went to town with this root, creating a bunch of morphological forms that aren't attested in any other branches, and in a few cases I can't even relate them to any standard derivational forms I know in either PIE or Proto-Germanic.
This is the family that no matter how long I work on it, it's never done. That's what I get for trying to explore the possibility that two extremely important and productive roots may be connected: *h₂er-, related to cosmic order, and *h₃reǵ-, related …
*bʰewdʰ- vs. *gʷʰedʰ-: two families that end up being super confusing in Germanic languages, since *bʰ and *gʷʰ merge at the beginning of a word. In English, they end up being homophones with complementary/opposite meanings: "offer" vs. "ask for".
We start religion words with *dyḗwos ph₂tḗr, Old Father Shining-Sky himself.
Interestingly English "day" is not from this root, despite similarity to many IE words for day, e.g. Latin diēs, etc. Germanic d corresponds to Latin f (PIE dʰ); Latin d corresponds …
A root meaning "to run, to depart" can be reconstructed from Hellenic and Indo-Iranian. But in Northwest branches, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, and possibly Italic, there is a phonologically identical root meaning "to die". So it's probably a euphemism coined in a Late Northwest Indo-European …
I'm not seriously proposing that words for "death" all across the Northern Hemisphere are related, but I'm not entirely not proposing that, or at least that there may be an ancient wander-word (possibly driven by taboo replacement?) that made its way across much Eurasia …
Sumerians and reeds were very influential! (Cuneiform was written with a sharpened reed stylus and was the first writing system, with Egyptian hieroglyphs possibly tied for first.)
I love how Indo-European *udrós, "aquatic", became the word for "otter" in 4 out of the 5 branches where it is attested, except for Greek where it became "sea serpent".
Here we have three possibly tied groups: Afro-Asiatic *ʔariĉ̣-: "earth" (e.g. eretz), Indo-European *h₁er-: "earth" (e.g. earth) and Indo-European "to plow" (e.g. arable)
There are several indicators that *h₁ was pronounced as a glottal stop, including a number of other …
This week begins a very loose July "theme" of a handful of miscellaneous everyday words, before we move into some strongly themed months for most of the rest of the year.
For 2017-07-07, I just had to do "seven".
All words mean "seven" unless otherwise specified.
On St. Patrick's Day, I reveal the secret reason I did horses in March.
Also, this one is really cool and just might go back all the way to the original domestication of horses in Central Asia. Maybe—just maybe—the Thai word for the knight …
ElfQuest is comic series that has been being published since 1978. It is considered a landmark in independent comic publishing, and has had a dedicated fan base for 40 years. ElfQuest has also had a deep influence on me, in many channels. I'm not going to try to explain …
Capernaum is a poem by Lewis Spence, which was set to music by Ed Miller and appears on his album, Border Background (1989). Miller’s arrangement is also the title song on the Tannahill Weaver’s album, Capernaum (1994).