Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2023/October

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← September 2023 · October 2023 · November 2023 → · (current)

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sunquat

RFV of the etymology.

Blend of sun +‎ kumquat

A contributor from Taiwan has been trying to change this to:

Blend of 酸 (syun¹) +‎ 橘 (gwat¹). “sun” is the Cantonese transliteration of 酸, and “quat” comes from Kumquat.

Although this makes perfect sense, the hybrid comes from Beeville, Texas, according to w:Sunquat. As I said on my talk page, if what makes etymological sense conflicts with actual reality, reality always wins.

I'm bringing this here on the off chance that the Wikipedia article is wrong (the sourcing doesn't seem all that solid), and to bring it to the attention of Chinese editors who don't need to use Google Translate to understand what @Nkywvuong wrote on my talk page (off the top of my head, @Justinrleung, RcAlex36, Wpi). Chuck Entz (talk) 23:09, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I think both etymologies do make sense, but a) as you've said it is from Texas which makes it unlikely to have both words from Cantonese (if the fruit is from say places with some Cantonese presence e.g. SF Bay Area in California then I might consider it), and b) from the source of the WP article the hybrid is first created during the 1950s(ish?), at which point sun as a transliteration of syun1 is probably a dated usage (I'm not sure if this is the case in the US).

Also, Nkywvuong has been somewhat "problematic" so to speak, with almost half of the edits being reverted ones, so I won't really trust them. By the way they said in their talkpage that they are from the Mainland, and the use of simplified characters makes it extremely unlikely to be Taiwan, so I doubt they would have that much knowledge about things outside of China. – wpi (talk) 04:50, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

@Wpi 用簡體就是大陸人？你要不要說除了香港人以外的華人都是大陸人算了？你嘛拜托一下！雖然你講廣東，我講福佬，但是咱攏是華人餒，確定欲相害？嘜相害會使嘸？ok？

工金ㄟ速阿豆阿欸婪趴金嫁某工丐后馁，吼昂某跨烂滑零告尕告仅某侯剩馁！宗基，迈吉白ㄟ赛某！ e04 Nkywvuong (talk) 19:33, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

hot button

What's the origin of this image? From the marketing sense? Some Man-Machine analogy? Jberkel 16:43, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I have some vague recollections of boxes with "hot buttons" being carried around by the US President during the cold war, which could start a nuclear war, or similar.. Wakuran (talk) 11:28, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

The metaphorical use for salesmanship is ascribed in 1944 to one Jack Lacey: ‘Jack Lacey, a top rating salesman, says that sales are made by touching off a “hot button” within the prospect’s mind.’^[1] Perhaps it stems originally from a button-operated water delivery system, such as described here: ‘There are eight button selections for the kitchen sink marked: DISPOSER, HOT, WARM, COLD, DRINK, HI FLO, LO FLO and OFF. At each lavatory and bathtub there are four button selections. If you want hot water, you press the HOT button and in seconds you have water of a preselected temperature. No longer is it necessary to let the water run to “hurry” it (hot or cold) to the faucet—it’s there as soon as you press the button.’^[2]  --Lambiam 15:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Apparently the man’s full name was Maurice James Lacy (not Lacey), who used Hot Button as a trademark in 1948 and applied for having it registered in 1953.^[3]  --Lambiam 16:06, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

So it's from the sales sense, and even trademarked, how depressing. Thanks for the help! Jberkel 16:21, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Is the trademark still valid? What usage does it actually cover? DCDuring (talk) 18:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Lacy applied for registration; the publication in the Official Gazette of the US Patent Office served to offer the opportunity to oppose registration. The website of the USPTO lists five live and many dead instances of a registered trademark HOT BUTTON, but I don't find an indication this or a similar trademark was successfully registered by Lacy.  --Lambiam 09:45, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

While searching citations for the entry I found mentions that "hot button" was copyrighted. “We recognized its importance years ago and copyrighted it” (https://archive.org/details/hotbuttonsalesma00mica/page/8/mode/2up). Of course this could be wrong. Jberkel 10:29, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

The fact that they say copyright instead of trademark is a red flag to me. I admit I didnt even so much as skim the rest of the book, so maybe it's written in loose language all the way through, but a two-word phrase is not eligible for copyright and I'd think someone in the business would know the difference. —Soap— 10:52, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Polish ponieważ and Czech poněvadž

@Sławobóg @ZomBear @Zhnka I need some input for these.

Boryś and Mańczak both consider the Polish term native and coming from *poňe va že, I'm not exactly sure what the *va is from, Boryś says "compare ledwie and понева (poneva) (&), whereas Rejzek and Bańkowski consider the second element -vad- uncertain. Bańkowski also considers the Polish term to be borrowed from Czech via Silesian which honestly wouldn't surprise me. The first element would be a univerbation of *po ňe, from *po *jь, which could use an entry.Vininn126 (talk) 08:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

@Vininn126The particle Proto-Slavic *va is present in Proto-Slavic *edъva < Proto-Balto-Slavic *edwāˀs < Proto-Indo-European *h₁edʰ-weh₂-s. Related to Lithuanian võs (“hardly”) (< *-wāˀs < *-weh₂s).

• Derksen, Rick (2008) “*ed(ъ)và”, in Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 4), Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 139: “BSl. *edvaHs < PIE *h₁edʰ-ueh₂-s”
• Derksen, Rick (2015) “vos”, in Etymological Dictionary of the Baltic Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 13), Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 510: “BSL *(ed)waˀs”

In addition to the Czech poněvadž and Polish ponieważ, there is also a dialectal Slovak poneváč, as well as obsolete Ukrainian понева́ж (poneváž), Old Ruthenian поневажъ (ponevaž), поневажь (ponevažʹ), Old East Slavic понева же (poneva že). About the element -d-, which is present in the Czech form, is written in the Ukrainian Etymological Dictionary: “...particle *va, pronominal element *d (absent in Polish and Old East Slavic forms)...”.

• Melnychuk, O. S., editor (2003), “поневаж”, in Етимологічний словник української мови [Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language] (in Ukrainian), volumes 4 (Н – П), Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, →ISBN, page 511

ZomBear (talk) 11:27, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

@ZomBear Could OES and the ilk be borrowed from Middle Polish? Vininn126 (talk) 11:31, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

@Vininn126 Ukrainian Etymological Dictionary mentions this, but writes that the word itself was unlikely to have been borrowed from Polish into East Slavic languages. The Ukrainian понева́ж (poneváž) has only undergone the semantic influence of the Polish ponieważ, but it still continues the Old East Slavic понева же (poneva že) < which is probably from *poňe va že. ZomBear (talk) 11:42, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

@ZomBear If these are indeed inherited, then it could be possible that Polish inherited it as well, which would surprise me since it would see that the particle *va(d) is mostly Czech. Vininn126 (talk) 11:58, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Okay, the entry Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/poňevaže seems to have put everything in order. Thanks @Sławobóg. Vininn126 (talk) 14:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Addis Ababa = Spanish ababol?

Might Amharic አበባ (ʾäbäba, “flower”) (used in the name of Ethiopia's capital city) be cognate to Spanish ababol (“red poppy”)? What looks like an interesting coincidence seems more plausible, perhaps, looking at links in time and space, such as Andalusian Arabic حَبَّبَوْر (ḥabbabawr, “type of poppy”) and classical Syriac ܗܒܒܐ (habbāḇā, “flower”). Since the Arabic word is a loan from classical Latin, it is likely much older than Arabic presence in Spain, and might therefore have been loaned from Latin at the height of Roman expansion, when Arabic was spoken mostly or entirely in the Arabian peninsula. This would give the word plenty of time to diffuse into other Semitic languages, perhaps even into Amharic, eventually becoming the primary word for flower in that language.

The long Arabic word up above is a compound. Its first element is حب (“love”), from the root ḥ-b-b, which forms words for love and for grain and seeds. Grain and seeds are pretty close to flowers, but we don't specifically list a word for flower as deriving from the root ḥ-b-b alone. There are forms of the root that have a third b, such as حبب (ḥabbaba), which look like potential links to the Amharic word, but this is a verb, and I'm not sure there is a way to get to a noun from it. And it still doesn't quite get us to the meaning of flowers.

So my question is .... are the Syriac and Amharic roots above derived just from the ḥ-b-b root, with the longer forms coming from some well-known Semitic grammatical process, or do we need to derive them from a longer, compounded form such as ḥabbabawr?

Thanks for all your help. —Soap— 06:56, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

@Soap: The former. Amharic disfigures the laryngeals. And each Semitic language has its own transfix upon this root, and like roots, which confusingly enough had already variants in prehistory, something ideophonic about bulges, I wrote about it on ح ب ب (ḥ-b-b) and ع ب ب (ʕ-b-b). The existence of quadriliterals for Semitic can generally be reduced, and we barely have derivational suffixes or something, although you are right to observe that many roots tertiae r should be suspected to have acquired their r secondarily by an obscure process of “forming roots from other roots”. Hardly in this case though:

I have not at all implied that حَبَّبَوْر (ḥabbabawr) was loaned from Classical Latin at the height of Roman expension. On early one was قَمِيص (qamīṣ), which we imagine to have become known to Arabs after some Roman soldiers got lost in the desert. Else the influx of Latin material increases over the centuries, and this one, حَبَّبَوْر (ḥabbabawr), could not have been borrowed before the 8th century, presupposing the conquest of the African Latin speaking areas. And حَبّ (ḥabb), the frequency of which you underestimate, was connected, because this word can be attached for any “fruit” or “seed”: See آس (ʔās), it is a strange wording for Western ears. Fay Freak (talk) 12:23, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Okay thanks. I showed this to someone else as well, and they agreed that the Latin is not the source of the two eastern words, but also pointed out that the H sounds don't match in the words above, so that حَبَّبَوْر (ḥabbabawr), with the love root, is probably not cognate to the two flower words, which means that ܗܒܒܐ (habbāḇā, “flower”) and አበባ (ʾäbäba, “flower”) come from some unknown root and not from ḥ-b-b. This is how we have it now, since the two flower words are only linked to each other and not to a known Semitic root, so nothing needs to change, but I'm still curious if we have any obvious leads as to what the source of the two flower words might be. Is -āḇā ("-ava") in the Syriac word a known suffix? Is the Amharic word descended from a form with that same suffix? Or are those words descended from a consonantal root that's just h-b-b? Or could they be irregularly derived from ḥ-b-b after all? It may not be possible for us to figure this out, and only to guess, but Im curious if we could at least identify which parts of the words above are part of the root and part of the suffix. Also, a mistake I made above ... حَبَّبَوْر (ḥabbabawr) is not a poppy, but a poppy-like flower, perhaps one more suited to grow in hot climates. It appears that the word shifted in meaning from poppy in Latin, to the new flower in Arabic, and back to poppy when reloaned into Spanish and the other Romance languages. This seems odd, but again could perhaps be explained by differences in climate. —Soap— 06:10, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

@Soap: The someone is wrong. I’ve said Amharic disfigures the laryngeals, in comparison to other Ethiopic Semitic languages, say Harari and even Argobba. Which means ʕ and ḥ /ħ/ merge with the glottal stop / ∅, by now all written with the glottal stop row, as opposed to “archaic spellings”, e.g. አዲስ (ʾaddis) vs. the forms linked there, to say nothing about ḫ /x/ which is not a phoneme in Ethiosemitic anymore but usually merged with ḥ: descendants of خَوْخ (ḵawḵ). While over the Middle Ages ḥ often variated with h. In some present Aramaic dialects they me all have merged. ḥ and ḫ /x/ merged in the 2th century BCE in Hebrew and Aramaic and thus generally cannot be separated anymore as even fully vocalized script does not mark the difference, which vanished centuries before the development of the vocalization systems of the relevant scripts. And even though the script then distinguished x/ḥ and ʕ and ʔ/∅, the distinction became increasingly unreliable with the centuries, especially in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, but Classical Syriac also has variants, and sometimes only the corruption gets borrowed as in عَمْرُوسَة (ʕamrūsa) found instead with /j/ in յիմար (yimar), see also أُهْبَة (ʔuhba) vs. יהבא (yhbɁ), and sometimes we do not know the original, as for the relatives of عِرْنَاس (ʕirnās) (were the original may even be /q/). Obviously sometimes Arabic dialects now also have changes between ḥ and ʕ and ḥ and h and such things are already attested for antiquity, sometimes as alternative forms and sometimes variants have become the only forms, which must be considered for etymology explanation.

He or she is wrong about supposing they could not have happened arbitrarily in older Semitic languages, I have already expanded upon the potential relations. The relatable semantics over whole similar roots are more important than the stupid match of individual words. Which then means we know relations but we can neither reconstruct a particular word nor a ”known” root – there are multiple imaginable starting points that could have led to the given result.

I have already said that there is little such a thing as derivational suffixes in Semitic, to the point that there are no known suffixes in Arabic save ـِيّ (-iyy) and ـَة (-a), and correspondingly we see in Syriac -āy and feminizing t, with -ā as the Aramaic emphatic state ending; in addition to Arabic they but have the abstraction suffixes -īṯ, -ūṯ. But derivational prefixes and suffixes can be posited for Proto-Semitic and Proto-West Semitic; for example the n- prefix mentioned at א־ו־ר, and this is only an example we are more confident about. Roots have been formed from other roots in obscure fashions that aren’t regularly productive in the attested individual languages. Fay Freak (talk) 11:15, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Two peters possibly the same?

Currently peter#Etymology_2 “a safe” and peter#Etymology_5 “a prison cell” lack etymology. I wonder if these both are the same as Green's peter n.³, in which he includes senses “a safe or cash-box” and “a cell, whether in jail, a police station or elsewhere”. The senses “safe”, “cell”, and Green's “a trunk, a bundle, a bag” all seem to share an element of ‘container’. Cnilep (talk) 07:22, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Cant add anything else but that the use of a container word for a prison (cell) parallels jug according to the most likely etymology. —Soap— 20:21, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

We have not evidence other than our own sense of what is plausible. Three of us find it plausible that these definitions have a common etymology. Ergo I'd argue for combining them to minimize waste of vertical screen space. Obviously, sufficient evidence of distinct origin would lead to splitting them again. DCDuring (talk) 14:40, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

I combined the two under one heading and added what etymology I could find. Cnilep (talk) 23:37, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Looks like it took a lot of searching to find an etymology of something not likely to leave much of a trail. DCDuring (talk) 00:34, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Just a wild (and probably far-fetched) guess: could it have anything at all to do with Saint Peter, known in Christian folklore as the one with the keys to Heaven and Hell? Also, with anything from Thieves' Cant, rhyming slang should always be considered, but I can't think of a good candidate for the original phrase. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:59, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Peter Pan / the can? Or is that usage of "the can" more of an americanism? Wakuran (talk) 01:20, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

The "safe" definition, at least, predates Peter Pan (1902). DCDuring (talk) 04:12, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

For Pete's sake! Wakuran (talk) 12:07, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

go set

Hey. Which meaning of set does the phrase go set come from? P. Sovjunk (talk) 06:27, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't know, but sense 2 needs to be rephrased as it is currently defined as a noun. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:03, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Also, it is a transitive verb in the usex, while in the wild it seems to be used only intransitively.  --Lambiam 11:08, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Also, we should probably mention which card games it's used in P. Sovjunk (talk) 11:11, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

I've played canasta and am not familiar with this phrase at all, but perhaps professional card players are more likely to use game-specific terms. A lot of the game can be played without saying a single word to the other players, after all, and sometimes we talk about daily life to fill the silence. —Soap— 12:36, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Pinging @Purplebackpack89 as the creator of the entry. —Mahāgaja · talk 13:03, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

'set' is used this way in spades, where one or a team can go set or be set. Leasnam (talk) 14:54, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

@P. Sovjunk I'm not sure I agree with your base assumption. "Go set" could be at least partially idiomatic, and therefore it wouldn't necessarily correspond to any one definition of "set". FWIW, I also reworded definition number 2 so it's a verb now Purplebackpack89 03:22, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

paraffin scale

Which meaning of scale does this come from? OED has an excellent section on the etymology, but I can't access it. P. Sovjunk (talk) 22:04, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

It's Etymology 2, the one derived from Old French escale, and I would say is most closely related to sense 5 - "the flaky material sloughed off heated metal" - or to sense 7, limescale. The OED etymology section is, sadly, entirely unhelpful; it consists merely of "Formed within English, by compounding." and links to paraffin, but not to scale. But the examples section is more useful:

1880, Spons' Encycl. Manuf., volume 1, page 586:

The crude solid product separated from the light and heavy oils by the mineral oil refiners, and known as ‘paraffin scales’.

1949, Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Our Industry, 2nd edition, page 335:

Paraffin scale, similar to paraffin wax, but less highly refined and having a higher oil content. It may vary from white to light yellow in colour.

Qwertygiy (talk) 01:56, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Awesome. Thanks for the research P. Sovjunk (talk) 12:48, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

There is a term scale wax: ‘There is a quality of paraffine wax termed ‘‘scale wax.’’ It is unrefined, and has an odor of coal oil.’ The Bee-keeper’s Magazine, vol. VI, no. 2 (February 1878), p. 39^[4]. The combinations crude scale wax, white scale wax and paraffin scale wax also occur.^[5] Yet another variation is scale paraffin wax.^[6] All this suggests that in paraffin scale, scale is short for scale wax, similar to how in the oil trade crude is short for crude oil. This shortening is in fact seen in action in this sentence: “Third, the filter yield per ton of fuller’s earth, when finishing the scale wax from the wax distillate, was greatly increased from about 10 to almost 40 barrels of scale per ton of earth.”^[7]  --Lambiam 12:34, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Any possibility that 'unrefined paraffin' has/had the appearance of scales ("flakes")? DCDuring (talk) 16:49, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

What I can find about its appearance and consistency is not much:

• Scale wax is the product obtained from sweating slack wax. [Sweating is a heat treatment to remove oil from slack wax.] Scale wax has a yellow tinge as a result of its slight oil content. At the end of a sweat the scale in the sweaters looks porous, and when some is picked up it breaks away with a fibrous, stringy surface.^[8]
• Scale wax [produced by honeybees!] is crystalline, with the crystallites vertically inclined to the plane of the scale.^[9]
• Scale insects are so called because some secrete a scalelike wax coating over their back and others resemble bark scales.^[10]

If in the last quotation “scalelike wax” means “wax similar to scale wax”, the mention of bark scales supports your flakey theory. So does the mention of “plane” for the bee wax.  --Lambiam 06:38, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

This is a case where an image can clarify a plausible etymology hypothesis, possibly offering strong support. I try to do that with organism names. DCDuring (talk) 15:37, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

The Google images I've looked at show paraffin in the form of blocks (my initial expectation) as well as small cubish chucks and flatter bits that might lead one to think "scale". Not supporting evidence, but not contradictory. This discussion will be on the entry's talk page, I hope, to preserve the hypothesis. DCDuring (talk) 15:47, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

If the sense of paraffin scale in the article “An experimental study on high-pressure water jets for paraffin scale removal in partially blocked production tubings” is the same as we are discussing here, it forcibly suggests it is the same scale as in limescale. Quote: ‘For ease of discrimination from mineral scales which are more challenging to remove, wax scales are regarded as “soft scales”, reflecting their relative ease of removal.’ Regardless, we need a more general definition for the sense “deposit” of scale; not all scale build-up is specifically limescale.  --Lambiam 15:04, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Scale seems like a good entry for improvement by applying sense/subsense structure, with some of the senses having subsenses that are clearly shown to be examples. There are many forms of "scale" in, eg, pipes and human-created vessels, of which limescale is notable because it is an old and common one, possibly prototypical. DCDuring (talk) 16:25, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

simp and its development

Based on the current evidence, it looks like the modern specialized slang meaning of simp probably developed from an earlier more general pejorative sense along the lines of 'fool, idiot, jerk'. But our entry doesn't currently seem to do much to trace how that development happened, instead restricting itself to saying "Originated in West Coast hip hop culture in the 1980s. Further etymology unknown." I think we can probably do better.

The timeline here shows a number of early-ish uses in hip hop, and in a number of them it is not apparent that the word specifically means " A man who foolishly overvalues and defers to a woman, putting her on a pedestal." E.g. "Taking out all simps and suckers, you know the flavor" (Ice-T)--it's not clear what it specifically means here.

I think the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot citation that we cite doesn't actually seem to fit the sense that we quote it under. Let's look at the lyrics:

But I gotta be straight when I say I wanna (uh) / 'Til the break of dawn / Baby got it goin' on / A lot of simps won't like this song / 'Cause them punks like to hit it and quit it / And I'd rather stay and play / 'Cause I'm long, and I'm strong / And I'm down to get the friction on

The narrator is saying that he wants to have sex all night, in contrast to "simps" who like to "hit it and quit it" (have sex and then leave): is the latter behavior associated with foolish deference to women? I can't see how. But if "simps" in this context is instead a more general pejorative along the line of 'fools', then these lyrics make sense. If that is the actual meaning, then the Sir Mix-a-Lot quote might be a useful example of a bridge between the earlier sense and the use of the word in hip-hop. Urszag (talk) 09:15, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Even without Sir Mix-a-Lot, it is not implausible that the specific hip-hop sense developed from the use by male chauvinists for men with a respectful attitude towards their female partners, regarded by them as fools. But we cannot dismiss the other theories out of hand.  --Lambiam 12:47, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

The etymology says <<blend of sissy + pimp>> - is this right ? A pimp is *not* simp-ish or simp-like. I think a blend of sissy and wimp makes way more sense... Leasnam (talk) 22:00, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

I've added wimp to the etymology. Leasnam (talk) 03:04, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

There's another problem in that entry: "Originally restricted to African-American slang, until it received a boost in usage in the late 2010s through Internet culture, having been popularized through Twitch and TikTok." This isn't correct; the use of "simp" in the sense of a man giving a woman too much deference already appears in Friends S08E05, which aired in October 2001. It was definitely not African-American slang at that time.

beautimous

Currently the etymology section for beautimous reads: "Uncertain, probably a portmanteau of beautiful and gorgeous." This was added without citation on March 30, 2023. I can't find that particular etymology given for that word from any other source else that isn't just referring back to Wiktionary. Personally I would think the word is closer to, and possibly influenced by, the archaic or poetic "beauteous", but that's just my conjecture. The Rice University Neologisms Database, maintained by students in the English and Linguistics departments at Rice University in Texas, gives the etymology of beautimous as "Blend of beautiful and fabulous". But that seems also as unlikely as the "gorgeous" explanation, since neither explains the "M". And since the Rice Neologisms Database seems to be mostly composed by students, and the only source the "beautimous" entry gives for its etymology is "A friend", it doesn't seem very rigorous. I think this etymology should be sourced, or else removed, because right now it seems like original research which is not even very compelling even for original research. --VolatileChemical (talk) 21:15, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Looks to me like a blend of beautiful and unanimous, i.e. "unanimously (considered) beautiful" Leasnam (talk) 21:22, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Could it be a respelling of a humorous pseudo-Latin superlative *beautimus (compare optimus and maximus)? The form beautimost is also found.^[11][12][13]  --Lambiam 12:58, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Could be a variant of -ma-#English which didn't need the schwa because it already precedes a schwa. —Soap— 13:19, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

According to the source referenced there, -ma- was recently introduced into Vernacular American English and popularized particularly by the speech of Homer Simpson in The Simpsons. There are uses of beautimous from 1972^[14] and 1974.^[15]  --Lambiam 05:35, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

maximus makes a lot of sense, but people who use the term don't really strike me as erudite. It could even be a blend with glamorous. Leasnam (talk) 22:12, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

It is hard to explain the ⟨m⟩ arising from blending beautiful + glamorous unless you posit an intermediate *beautimorous. The people using the term now are not the person(s) who coined it, so their level of erudition is not relevant. The -imus theory is really a shot in the dark, though.  --Lambiam 16:03, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/putōną

Would somebody care to look into the etymology of this Proto-Germanic word? For a while, its etymology section said: "Uncertain. Perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *bud- (“to shoot, sprout”); if so, then possibly cognate with Sanskrit बुन्द (bundá, “arrow”), Lithuanian budė, budis (“mushroom, fungus”)." But this morning, an IP editor added additional text stating two shortcomings of this theory. Assuming good faith, I made some minor corrections to the text to make it clearer. See Special:Diff/76313862 and Special:Diff/76313804. And for future reference, can someone tell me how we find etymological information for reconstruction words? Thanks. Inner Focus (talk) 14:28, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Im a skeptic on the existence of PIE /b/ as well, and there are many other dead-end roots, especially in Germanic, that go back to a redlinked PIE root supposedly beginning with /b/. I think a lot of them are loans, at least some from a substrate, though a few may be loans from other IE languages. But we can't just ignore all these roots, and it isnt our place to say, "well it must have been gʷ or bh or gʷh then!" either. Likewise, while there are not many PIE roots with two voiced stops, this is far from the only one.

If there is a viable alternate reconstruction that would link these three roots, we could list that, but I think that's impossible ... the only PIE consonant that could explain any two of these three reflexes is /b/. So, if there was no /b/, this root either does not exist or must have been loaned into two of the three branches. If anything I'd actually favor removing the recent additions, even though as I said above that I agree with them .... if we follow the logic through, we would need similar comments on many other IE pages, and then if we addressed other theories as well, we'd have warnings under every page that uses plain velars, for example, or adds a laryngeal next to an /o/, and so on .... —Soap— 15:40, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

I am skeptic to the extent that I don't fully understand the different flavors of Glotalic theory. For example, Kortlandt wrote 2012 that "There is an exact parallel for the rise of preaspiration from preglottalization after devoicing in Burmese hp < *ʔp < *ʔb beside p < *b (cf. Bradley 1979: 130)." (Proto-Indo-European glottalic stops: The evidence revisited. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 71/1 (2018), 147-153.) Kortlandt 2020 was published in JIES by Emily Blanchard West (How I discovered Proto-Indo-European glottalic stops. Journal of Indo-European Studies 51). Around the same time, Olander's study of *b was accepted in HF, arguing that "there is no evidence at all for the existence of Proto-Indo-European *b in initial position" (To *b or not to *b: Proto-Indo-European *b in a phylogenetic perspective. Historische Sprachforschung 133 (2020)).

The problem is they are talking different languages. Glottalic theory casts *p as pre-glottalized *'p, but *bh as real *b (after Gamkrelidze and Ivanov if I remember correctly), which was widely rejected. This is supposed to be in line with Grimm's law in Germanic. *p / *bh remains the norm since Schleicher, *b having marginal status. Germanic *p is nevertheless acceptable under Verner's law, cp. up, and under expressive gemination, cp. stop. The rest is suspect of borrowing, cp. uber from German, Kopp "caput" from Latin, Pfad "path" from Awar? So I never get anywhere near Proto-Indo-European. The essential problem to my mind is that Gamkrelidze and Ivanov propose an early division of the Germanic branch from PIE and Ringe finds even worse, that Germanic does not fit any tree (Indo‐European and Computational Cladistics. Transactions of the Philological Society Volume. 1001 (2002)) of his mathematically proven theory (2007, preface). I have utmost respect for Kortlandt, who holds a Master's degree in Computer Science, and little to no respect for the Swadesh approach to phylogeny elsewhere such as Heggarty et al. most recently (Language Trees with Sampled Ancestors Support a Hybrid Model for the Origin of Indo-European Languages. Science 381, no. 6656 (July 28, 2023)) or the Moscow school (A long time ago in a high, high ranked journal... Review of Heggarty et al. by Kassian and Starostin).

I don't know what others will add to the discussion, but having an accessable list from a bot run could be useful to anyone. PapasUlysse (talk) 19:25, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Could *spewd- (“to press, push”) be a candidate, if it somehow lost its initial s after Germanic diverged ? We always look for PIE *b- to explain PGmc *p-, but is that the only option ? I'm just throwing out ideas, I haven't really thought much about it, but it seems off my head that a few p- terms have correspondences in sp-. We have Gmc *pind- (Proto-West Germanic *pinn) "point, pin" from a possible *spey- (“long, sharp, pointy”) (> Proto-Germanic *spīkō (“spike”); also *pīkaz (“pickaxe”)), and *sparrô beside *parrik. I'm not steeped in PIE (at this point, as I mostly focus on Old/Middle/New English) but has anyone out there ever noticed or investigated these similarities or are they just coincidences ? Leasnam (talk) 20:21, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the EWA entry on *plehan says exactly that. Kroonen has a different idea. I cannot explehan in detail, haven't noted the references because I was looking for play. EWA rejects the notion. Kluge 20th ed. (spielen) suggested they are related, though. PapasUlysse (talk) 07:33, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Etymology of Bulgarian лющян (lovage)

Sadly, the BG etymological dictionary doesn't include this term. However, due to the closeness with Romanian leuștean and the presence of dialectal varieties like левощян (levoštjan), I think the provided etymology for the Bulgarian entry is incorrect, and it's either a Romanian loan, or mediated by the same language(s) that also give Hungarian lestyán. I can't trace that further, though - I'd appreciate your help!

Thanks,

Chernorizets (talk) 02:43, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Also considering the lack of a semantic relationship between лющян (ljuštján, “lovage”) and лющя (ljuštja, “to peel, to shell off”), it does not seem plausible that they are directly related. Perhaps an earlier *ле(в)щян underwent a sound change influenced by the verb. Romanian is the more common immediate donor to Bulgarian, but it may be hard to identify the path from Latin to Bulgarian more specifically with any certainty.  --Lambiam 05:05, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

The Bulgarian Wikipedia also gives the variant леощян (leoštjan). [lʲo̟ʃˈtʲa̟n] < [lɛo̟ʃˈtʲa̟n] < [lɛuʃˈte̯an] is in my eyes a believable path.  --Lambiam 05:41, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

@Lambiam as it turns out, it is from Romanian. The Bulgarian Etymological Dictionary just had it under a headword for a dialect form (spoken, funny enough, in the Banat region of Romania). I've updated the Bulgarian entry accordingly. Chernorizets (talk) 10:12, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Portuguese cirurgião

The page seems to be saying that the word is inherited from Latin. Though, since apparently no forms beginning in cir- or cer- (only cil-/cel-) have been attested, isn't it possible that this is actually a (semi-)learned borrowing? MedK1 (talk) 02:59, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

In which language have such forms apparently not been attested? The putative Latin etymon is *chirurgianus.  --Lambiam 04:38, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

petrel

RFV of the etymology.

I looked at Online Etymology Dictionary and it is in line with what they say [[16]]. Leasnam (talk) 21:08, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

κεράννυμι

Problems with the etymology of κεράννυμι Were noted in May 2019 and nothing has been corrected. I'm too much of a newcomer at Wictionary to feel confident about fixing this.

To make this easier, I will quote from The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix. In agreement with Beekes, they assign κεράννυμι to PIE:

• kerə- To mix, confuse, cook. Oldest form *k̑erh2‑, becoming *kerh2‑ in centum languages.

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR044300

As it stands, the article assigns it to a root meaning “horn.” Will someone who is more familiar with the format of Wictionary please improve. I can find no other authority who believes that κεράννυμι is derived from a PIE root meaning “horn.” Neelthakrebew (talk) 03:16, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, our entry for κεράννυμι (keránnumi) assigns it to a root of the shape *ḱerh₂-, which AHD also does, but doesn't say what that root means. The problem is that our entry for *ḱerh₂- only lists one such root, the one meaning 'head, horn'. We haven't yet gotten around to creating an entry for the homophonous root that κεράννυμι (keránnumi) comes from. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:58, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. Has the task been assigned to anyone? I would at least hope that the link to the incorrect PIE root can be inactivated. Neelthakrebew (talk) 09:11, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

As a volunteer project, we dont really have assignments, nor people who can assign them. Additionally, if I understand right we typically dont list a root as going back to PIE if it is only attested in one branch, so to add this, we would need to find attestation outside Greek, which could be difficult. However, one thing we could do right now, if we're sure that this isn't from the horn meaning, is put a gloss next to the etymology on the κεράννυμι page so readers would have the information close at hand and not need to click onto the PIE page at all. Lastly, I couldnt find any discussion from 2019. Could you show us please what you read? Thanks, —Soap— 09:58, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Would you be able to mix grains and spices with a horn, using it as a pestle in a mortar? Too far-fetched?... Wakuran (talk) 12:52, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

At least one other claimed descendant of *ḱerh₂- (“to mix”) is Sanskrit (आ-)शिर् ((ā-)śir, “mixing, a mixture”) and Avestan 𐬯𐬀𐬭 (sar, “to mix”). —Mahāgaja · talk 14:22, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

here's the link to the May 2019 discussion

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Etymology_scriptorium/2019/May#%CE%BA%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%AC%CE%BD%CE%BD%CF%85%CE%BC%CE%B9_(ker%C3%A1nnumi) Neelthakrebew (talk) 07:54, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

באַן

Do we know for sure that this was borrowed from German? The Middle High German ban would seem like a reasonable ancestor from which Yiddish באַן (ban) could be derived. Especially since, according to the provided IPA, the Yiddish word doesn't have the long vowel that is present in German Bahn. There's semantic influence, no doubt, but I'm not totally certain that the word just came from German outright. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 08:49, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

The pronunciation given reflects YIVO/Litvish pronunciation, where there's no contrastive vowel length anyway. I think if Middle High German ban had been inherited into Yiddish it would be *באָן (*bon). —Mahāgaja · talk 09:13, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Normally isn't it ā which becomes אָ? I know that there are cases of just a in MHG becoming אָ, but at the same time there's also several Yiddish words inherited from MHG that have just אַ, so a theoretical MHG *bān would be a likelier candidate for *באָן (*bon). It also appears that Yiddish has a unique diminutive of the word that isn't found in German (or is at best highly dialectal): בענכל (benkhl), as seen here. Haven't really found *Bähnchel anywhere. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 09:20, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

To judge from נאָמען (nomen) < Middle High German name, the lengthening in an open syllable before a voiced consonant happened early enough to be affected by ā > o. Are there cases of inherited אַ < a in an open syllable before a voiced consonant or specifically before a nasal? —Mahāgaja · talk 13:58, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

I guess גאַנג (gang) fits the bill. I've looked around a bit for גאָנג (gong) and all I could find was the musical instrument gong. Truthfully I just copied the etymology from German Gang when I created the entry, but also the evidence (e.g. the plural with umlaut and a plural form that differs from the German one) suggests (to me) that this is inherited rather than borrowed from German. Edit: although now I've found a lot of so-called "derived terms" from גאַנג (gang) (e.g. arayngang, opgang) and these all have definitions similar to their German cognates, so now I'm not so sure... Insaneguy1083 (talk) 16:48, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Actually, would וואַנט (vant) count? It is inherited from MHG want, although I'm not sure whether the -t at the end would affect the formation of o. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 17:00, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

• נאָמען (nomen) cannot be from Middle High German name. Singular Namen persists, surprisingly, chiefly in ptc. namens. PapasUlysse (talk) 18:32, 14 October 2023 (UTC)
• Bann and Bahn are presumably cognate, banlieu and Reeperbahn. I don't agree that they have the same vowel only distinguished by length. Sg. Bahn and pl. Bahnen are contrastive with secondary stress which may be realized differently, i.e. by length pl. /ba:n/. Stress can collapse in compounds, Eisenbahn / Eisenbahnen not unlike Nachnamen. This also holds for Mus, pl. Muse but the orthography does not reflect mousse perhaps brcause it is mostly used in compounds like Apfelmus, contrasting with the back vowel in Mostrich (mustard), Most, Apfelmost. PapasUlysse (talk) 19:15, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

@Insaneguy1083: Middle High German ganc and want both have the a in a closed syllable (and there was no lengthening in German either), so they're not counterexamples. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:50, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

On a tangential note: שטראַל (shtral) is interesting. Middle High German strāle is generally expected to give *שטראָל (*shtrol), but I couldn't find the latter in any dictionary. Could שטראַל (shtral) be a borrowing from German Strahl? Insaneguy1083 (talk) 21:05, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

From the phonological side, absolutely. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:58, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

ליאַדע

Any ideas on the etymology? I was thinking it might be linked to Russian на кой ляд (na koj ljad) but from other sources I've read, ляд (ljad) appears to be a rather vulgar word, which isn't reflected in any of the Yiddish dictionaries I consulted for ליאַדע (lyade). Not to mention it would be hard to explain the ־ע at the end if it did indeed descend from ляд (ljad). Insaneguy1083 (talk) 22:57, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Could there be a connection to German jeder, or would the initial l- be difficult to explain? Wakuran (talk) 23:05, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Hebrew ל ^{(after looking into it further, it's really ל־)}, is a very common preposition meaning something like "to" that is usually prefixed to the first word in a phrase. I'm not sure, though, whether it's used the same in Yiddish with non-Hebrew terms. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:14, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Is it always prefixed with אַ (a), making it אַ ליאַדע (a lyade) ? If so, it looks curiously like Middle High German al (“all”) + jeder (“every”) Leasnam (talk) 01:10, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

So, a similar rebracketing as English a newt from an ewt, then? Wakuran (talk) 03:24, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz @Wakuran: Never mind, I think I found it. See the entry for details, although if anyone could find more documentation for the (as yet hypothetical) intermediate ля́да (ljáda) that would be greatly appreciated.

@Leasnam: probably not true here, but I did actually find אַיעדער (ayeder) on other dictionaries meaning "each" or "every", so you may be onto something there. (Turns out it already exists as an entry, how convenient.) Insaneguy1083 (talk) 04:23, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

@Insaneguy1083 the first entry on this page mentions the Russian and Ukrainian descendants of the Proto-Slavic term: https://www.proto-slavic.ru/dic-trubachev/essja-l/pslf-le2d.htm. Chernorizets (talk) 00:59, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll add the Russian and Ukrainian descendants to the Etymology section. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 09:21, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Also side note: in my experience Middle High German al tends to become just אַ (a) in compounds; see אַזוי (azoy) and אַדורך (adurkh). So if anything, al + jeder would sooner result in אַיעדער (ayeder) than *אַליעדער (*alyeder). Not to mention we're talking about ליאַדע (lyade) here, with no final R as well. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 04:56, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

I thought about the final R, but - not knowing much about Yiddish grammar - I considered that part less important, as that wasn't part of the stem but the declension, anyway. Oh well, apparently the suggestion was incorrect, anyhow. Wakuran (talk) 11:41, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

template:PIE word

Shouldn't we delete the use of this box in equus and genu? (the only two in the entire category category:Latin terms inherited from Proto-Indo-European) ※Sobreira ◣◥ 〒 @「parlez」 12:24, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

set square

I feel dumb asking this. Which sense of "set" does this come from? I always assumed it was form the adjective meaning "fixed", but I'm beginning to doubt my gut instinct P. Sovjunk (talk) 13:25, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I guess it's not a calque of norma (“carpenter's triangle”) in the sense of Sitte (social norm) because OE sidu is diametrically opposed. FEW's Germanismes don't confirm a Frankish source.

Setting is used in the etymology of algebra, translating جبر "resetting of broken parts" and جبر "to set (a broken bone)". The topic requires that it pertains to angles, however. PapasUlysse (talk) 04:48, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

I find descriptions of the use of these things stating that they can be used to “set out” (or “set off”) angles (or lines at an angle).^{[17][18][19][20]} The sense “position” for the verb set out is somewhat specific to British English. Perhaps the curious name comes from the verb. Other descriptions, however, state that the instrument has “set angles” or can be used to draw lines at “set angles”.^[21][22][23] This appears (to me) a more plausible explanation: a “set square” is a “set-angle” square.  --Lambiam 16:48, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

It is without a doubt that set admits several possible explanations. German setz- too, though inquiry yielded no trade name for the carpenters square. We agreed on rechter Winkel, equivalent to rectangle. Recht does equate to Sitte, by a margin, and side is archaic "angle", so yeah Frankish should be possible. PapasUlysse (talk) 21:37, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Alright, I'll plump with the adjective P. Sovjunk (talk) 17:35, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Mejal

Plautdietsch Mejal (“girl”). Is the etymology right ? Compare Old English meowle, Old Norse meyla (“girl”). mērgā and Mejal are not very similar. Leasnam (talk) 15:30, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Initially, I would guess either PGmc *mawilǭ or later PWGmc *magaþ +diminutive -(e)l. Wakuran (talk) 20:28, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Middle Low German has mêdelīn, medlin (“girl, young girl”). The Plautdietsch fits the Middle High German meidel, magedel (“girl, little girl”) better however. Leasnam (talk) 18:26, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/sundaz

RFV of the etymology. Tagged but not listed by an Anon (in reference to PIE *suntos). I've since updated the etymology to Proto-Indo-European *swent-. Leasnam (talk) 17:32, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Orel's handbook refers to *sanþaz, from PIE *h₁es- (“to be”), compare Hittite 𒀀𒀸𒋗𒍑 ašuwant (“good”).

Anatolian *-want appears to be a suffix, that I don't understand. aššu- is not unanimously agreed on (cf. Kloekhorst 2008). One PIE root for good appears to be *h₁su-, but we know from Irish that assent (!) can be rendered by repeating the verb, for example “is”, instead of saying “yes, good”. Kloekhorst's hot take is something else out of my league.

However, ŠÀ not ŠU seems to be playing a significant role in PIE *h₁én or *én, depending on who you ask. Kloekhorst pointed out “the fact that ištarna is sumerographically written with the sign ŠÀ, which literally means ‘heart’" as evidence against the comparison with inter (pace Melchert) and in favor of comparing στέρνον (stérnon, “breast”). Dunkel's analysis of *én ignores this. They agree about -an, Kloekhorst with reservation. Proto-Anatolian *endo and *endom are aptly summarized by eDiAna[24], [25], compare ἔνδον (éndon, “in, at home”). Hackstein (2023, When word coalesce II) reconstructs *ps-tén-, including Irish sine (“nipple, teat”) but neither sinus nor ištarna (“in the midst, among, between”). Safe to say that's controversial.

Now I think that *nesaną (“to return, heal”), PIE *nes- (“to return home (safely)”), may be related to *sundaz. It has been compared to Neša / Kaneš, the Hittite capital. Schwansen exists in the homestead of Angeln (1231 CE Swansø "Swan-Sea"). Orel confirms that *nesanan is related to Tocharian A nas-, B nes- (“to be”). Surprisingly, Adams suggests It is better to see in nes- an old “locative copula” *h1(e)no + ’s- ‘be here/there’ […] (A Dictionary of Tocharian B, 2014). bí ann checks out.

One reference for *swen- is Thorpe & Falk (per Orel). I used to think that sound (“healthy”) belongs with the other sense of sound (Latin sono) and that German Schwanz “member” is not figurative from “tail” but original in a primitive sense of strength as a baseline. PapasUlysse (talk) 20:55, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, but I can't follow what role either ŠÀ or ŠU could be playing in *én. Could you elaborate? —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 23:34, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

The user has been blocked for frequently coming up with largely incomprehensible hypotheses, circumventing prior bans with new usernames. Wakuran (talk) 02:56, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Heidermanns (1993: pp. 577-78) rejects a root of the form *swent-. He's for derivation from *seǵʰ- (“to overpower”): *seǵʰ-wr̥ ~ *sǵʰ-wén- (“power”) (see there and please correct my work), from which he also derives Sanskrit सहुरि (sáhuri-, “powerful, superior”), Sogdian [script needed] (xšawan-, “power”), Ancient Greek ἐχυρός (ekhurós, “secure”), and σθένος (sthénos, “strength”). —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 01:31, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

@Victar Can you explain why *sǵʰ-wént-s is more likely than *sǵʰ-wén-to-s? Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 13:01, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Because *seǵʰ- (root) +‎ *-wr̥ (noun) +‎ *-tós (deverbal adjective) is not a compound you see in PIE, much less with that stress, but *seǵʰ- +‎ *-wénts is very PIE, with an expected thematization in the PG. Heidermanns also knows nothing about Iranian if they think the Sogdian can derive from this root. --{{victar|talk}} 17:31, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Who's to say it was formed in PIE? *-wénts didn't exist in Germanic at all (Meid 1967 Vol. 3 p. 173), whereas possessive *-tós did (*wōstaz), especially secondarily compounded with other suffixes: *-itos, *-eh₂tos. It's uneconomical to posit a derived term in PIE with no cognates of a type which doesn't occur in Germanic when you could connect it to an already established term (*séǵʰ-wr̥ ~ *sǵʰ-wén-s) by means of an already established derivation. (I concede the point on Sogdian.) —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 02:11, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

You did, by adding the PIE reconstruction *sǵʰ-wén-to-s to RC:Proto-Indo-European/seǵʰ-. What does *-wénts not existing as a suffix PG have to do with anything -- we're talking about what the form was in PIE. See RC:Proto-Indo-European/h₂wéh₁n̥ts and RC:Proto-Germanic/nakwadaz if you want examples of nt-stem adjectives passing into PG. "Uneconomical" is irrelevant if you're making impossible PIE reconstructions.

If we were to assume it wasn't directly inherited from PIE, but instead of intra-PG derivative, we could theorize an unattested noun from *séǵʰ-wr̥ ~ *sǵʰ-wén-s, rebuilt as *swinô, or *swinaz, etc., and suffixed with *-þaz, which is also plausible, but with no attested noun, no sure bet.

Also, just to mention, I'm not super convinced by PIE *sǵʰw- > PG *sw-. --{{victar|talk}} 06:05, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

No, I didn't. I was merely following the (unstated) convention on this and many other reconstruction pages of transposing everything back into PIE.

Since *-wénts didn't exist in Germanic, it can't have formed in Germanic. That makes derivation in PIE the only possibilty, which requires an additional assumption (the existance of sǵʰ-wénts), which derivation from *séǵʰ-wr̥ ~ *sǵʰ-wén-s doesn't. Economy matters because we want to find the most plausible derivation.

Of course PIE *sǵʰw- > PG *sw- in uncertain, but it's plausible and both options we're considering assume it. —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 12:32, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Woof. Well, whatever "convention" you're justifying the creation of false PIE reconstructions, please stop. And multiple steps of derivation is not more "economical" than one. --{{victar|talk}} 19:53, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I think you do really good work on this project, but you sometimes act dismissively and refuse to engage in argument in good faith, which is a pity. It would grace you if you could occasionally concede a point. —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 00:59, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

@Leasnam I've update the etymology of RC:Proto-Germanic/swinþaz to reflect the above. PIE *sǵʰ-wént-s ~ *sǵʰ-wn̥tés also serves well as the source of RC:Proto-Germanic/sundaz. An etymology from *h₁es- (“to be”) should probably also be mentioned. --{{victar|talk}} 21:23, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

ringer

How confident are we about the way different senses are assigned to different etymologies? To start with the simplest question, on what basis is "crowbar" assigned to the "one who rings" etymology? Next up, "A person, animal, or entity which resembles another so closely as to be taken for the other [...] a dead ringer" (ety 3) does not actually seem like a separate word from "A look-alike [...] an exact ringer" (ety 5). Separating all of "A person highly proficient at a skill or sport who is brought in, often fraudulently" (ety 3) + "A top performer" (ety 4) and "A fraudulently cloned motor vehicle" (ety 3) + "Any person or thing that is fraudulent; a fake or impostor" (ety 5) into separate words with separate etymologies also seems difficult... - -sche (discuss) 21:37, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm also a bit unknown on whether the marbles and T-shirt sense would derive from the verb 'ring', and not be a suffixed form of the noun 'ring'. Wakuran (talk) 11:48, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

As is often the case, grouping into a sense/subsense structure seems desirable and should help with the etymology grouping. I'd bet on contributors not reading entries carefully enough to avoid duplication, having on occasion done so myself. DCDuring (talk) 14:42, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

What a mess! The crowbar sense could just be based on the sound it makes on hitting rock. (But so, conceivably, could the horsehoes sense be based on the sound made on hitting the pole.) I'm not at all sure the resemblance sense(s) and the fraud senses should be in different etymologies, though they might fit as subsenses under "resemblance" and "fraud" senses. Ety. 2 should include Ety. 6 and be rewritten around derivation from ring#Noun ("circular object") (or ring#Verb ("to form a circle around")), more or less as Wakuran suggested. All the definitions with any bell-ringing etymology could be under a single ring#Verb etymology (Ety. 1) with some (longish) explanation of sense development. Etymology 5 seems like a stretch too far: maybe just "unknown". DCDuring (talk) 15:46, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure. An "impostor" and a "look-alike" are rather similar concepts to me. Wakuran (talk) 03:00, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

gruyère

RFV of the etymology. This is for the French entry for the type of cheese, but the English entry (probably among others) has basically the same etymology:

• Named after the town of Gruyères, Switzerland, from Medieval Latin Gruerius, from Swiss French grue (“crane”).

Judging by the Wikipedia entry for the town Gruyères), there's a serious problem with this: "Gruyères is first mentioned around 1138-39 as de Grueri". Barring time travel, there's no way a name attested in the 12th century could have come from modern French.

The Wikipedia article also says that "Gruerius, the legendary founder of Gruyères, captured a crane (in French: “grue”) and chose it as his heraldic animal, inspiring the name Gruyères." I can see how Latin grus could have become "Gruerius" through an intermediary along the lines of *gruarius (with Latin -arius), but that's just a guess. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:41, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

According to the section Etymology and history of “grue”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012, the noun is attested in a bestiary dated 1121-34. In our periodization, that would have been a text in Old French, or specifically Anglo-Norman, since its author is “the first known poet to write in the Anglo-Norman French vernacular language, rather than Latin”.  --Lambiam 14:34, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

"original meaning" of 緑 [midori] in Japanese

The etymology entry for 緑 in Japanese says this: "From Old Japanese. Originally referred to new buds and shoots, later expanding via metonymy to mean green."

My question is, if the original meaning of this Japanese word referred to plants and not to the color, why is it spelled with a character that, in the early 3rd century, was already defined to mean a color with no reference to plants?

At least, according to zdic.net, the shuowen jiezi defines 綠 as "帛靑黃色也", which is clearly a color. If the word started out meaning "new buds / shoots", shouldn't it be spelled 芽? "Midori" does not appear to be a possible Japanese reading of 芽. 71.198.233.25 09:41, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Hey sorry this is my second edit here idk how to respond to your comment so ill just leave it here. According to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B6%A0#Translingual the character 綠 originally derives from "Proto-Sino-Tibetan *rwak (“leaf”), and cites Tibetan ཁྲོག་པོ (khrog po, “botanical term used of leaves standing round the stem scattered or alternately”)". The meaning of green is derived from the fact that leaves are green. This is further collaborated from the MOE dict listing one of the definitions of 綠 as 「一種像青草、樹葉的顏色...」(A colour similar to green grass or green leaves...)https://www.moedict.tw/%E7%B6%A0 . In this sense, there is a clear connection maintained between 緑 and plants in Chinese languages. I can only assume the same applies to Japanese. — This unsigned comment was added by Mantis1 Shone (talk • contribs) at 15:59, 25 October 2023 (UTC).

I'm not seeing how the fact that a Chinese dictionary from the late second century says "color, but not plant", and a Chinese dictionary from the twentieth century also says "color, but not plant" is supposed to support the idea that the character might have referred to a plant during the 8th century? (The period of "Old Japanese".)

(Note also that the character is certainly not derived from a word for "leaf". The word might be -- the Chinese word, that is -- but the character uses the radical for silk, not for plants, and the gloss given in the shuowen makes sense given that construction. The Japanese word is not related to the Chinese word so the etymology of the Chinese word wouldn't be relevant anyway.) — This unsigned comment was added by 71.198.233.25 (talk) at 12:20, 26 October 2023 (UTC).

My guess is that the character 綠 started being used to write みどり (midori) after its meaning had expanded to include the sense “green”, which was already attested in the Man'yōshū, written when the Japanese writing system was still developing. (see quotation from Kōjien) Mcph2 (talk) 00:28, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

As others have noted, the kanji spelling and the Japanese word don't necessarily have a lot to do with each other -- for kun'yomi words like midori, the Japanese word existed independently in Japanese, and the Chinese character was adopted to "spell" this word. Such spellings are (usually) based on some semantic (meaning) overlap between the Chinese word and the Japanese word, but keep in mind that this is based on the senses for that word in Middle Chinese dialects.

With that in mind, let's start by looking at the Japanese term midori, and look at the spelling later.

The Japonic term midori

My main source is the monolingual Japanese dictionary, 日本国語大辞典 (Nihon Kokugo Daijiten) or "NKD". The version of this dictionary made available for free online via Kotobank suffers from a site redesign a couple years back, where the site maintainers goofed during data migration and (apparently accidentally) stripped out most of the etymology sections. I've got a different edition I also use, which includes this information. The Kotobank version still has earliest attestations and dates, thankfully.

For midori, the Kotobank entry shows that this is attested as a standalone noun in the Man'yōshū poetry anthology of 759 CE with the sense of green, as in the color. This is before attestations as a standalone noun with the sense of bud, new shoot in the early 900s.

That said, the bud, new shoot sense is also attested in the Man'yōshū, in the compound term midoriko or midorigo ("a toddler, a child up until the age of around 3"). If we search the Old Japanese corpus available via ONCOJ for the term midorikwo (using their spelling system for the reconstructed Old Japanese vowel values), and click through the results links, we find various kanji spellings for the midori portion: 緑, 若, and 小. The first is the modern Japanese spelling for green (the color), while the latter two are the characters for young and small, reinforcing the idea that the color sense is not relevant for this compound.

Digging further into the Old Japanese (OJP) phonology, ONCOJ shows one instance of midorikwo spelled in phonetic Chinese characters, a practice known as man'yōgana: 弥騰里児 (with the first character appearing as the pre-simplified form 彌 in the NKD entry's quote). The reconstructed Old Japanese vowel values for this would be ⟨mi₁do₂ri⟩. From this, we can tell the following:

• The initial mi₁- is not cognate with Old Japanese 身 (mi₂, “body, main part”) or 実 (mi₂, “fruit, seed”): the OJP vowel ⟨i₁⟩ is reconstructed as either /i/ or /ji/, while ⟨i₂⟩ is reconstructed variously as /wi, ï, ïj, i, ɨ/ (where /i/ is always distinct between the 1 and 2 variants, regardless of the given author's chosen notation). This ⟨mi₁⟩ could match the verb stem and gerund of 見る (mi₁ru, “to see, to watch, to look at”).
• The -do₂ru could well be the rendaku form of Old Japanese 取る (to₂ru, “to take”).

There is indeed a term midori, more commonly mitori in modern usage, from verb midoru / mitoru, as a compound of 見る (mi₁ru, “to see, to watch, to look at”) + 取る (to₂ru, “to take”), with varied meanings:

• to look at and take -- to thoroughly look over and choose from a selection of things
• to look at and take [care of] -- to watch over someone, particularly someone sick
• to look at and take [a copy of] -- to watch someone or something and reproduce or copy, such as an image or mannerism

If midori ("green") is ultimately from this same compound root as the verb senses, this might represent a semantic shift from "looking-taking" in reference to the choicest parts of a plant that would be harvested for food or medicine.

Notably, the Kōjien dictionary entry suggests that the term's root is the initial mido- portion, which they link to the mizu- part of adjective 瑞々しい (mizumizushii, “young and fresh (as of skin); fresh and juicy (as of fruit)”). The older kana spelling of the adjective stem みづみづし would have been midzumidzusi in Classical Japanese, and it might be that the Kōjien editors thought that the midzu- portion of the adjective would match the mido portion of the word midori. However:

• There is already a Classical Japanese term midzu, the earlier form of modern 水 (mizu, “water”). Indeed, another spelling for mizumizushii is 水水しい, and the "water" sense seems a close semantic match for "juicy".
• The adjective mizumizushii isn't attested until the late 1800s. There is an earlier form mizumizu, but that only appears from the mid-late 1400s.
• The NKD entry for mizumizu suggests that this is possibly cognate with みんづり (mindzuri, “young and fresh”), but that is attested later in the mid 1600s.
• In words that have vowel shifts due to fusion and hiatus-avoidance, any /u/ → /o/ shifts produce OJP vowel ⟨o₁⟩ (see w:Old_Japanese#Morphophonemics) -- not the ⟨o₂⟩ we see in OJP mi₁do₂ri.

Unfortunately, many Japanese dictionaries have not yet been updated to factor in research into ancient special kana spellings, which can often clarify older forms of words and rule out certain etymological speculation. In this case, the Old Japanese vowel values would seem to obviate any potential connection between Old Japanese mi₁do₂ri and Late Middle Japanese mizumizushii.

The Sinic spellings for the Japonic term midori

Setting aside the looser poetic spellings of the Man'yōshū, for the green; bud, new shoot term midori, Japanese sources (Daijirin, Daijisen, Shin Meikai, NKD, Kōjien) consistently list two kanji spellings: 緑 and 翠. Kanji references also sometimes include 碧. Let's explore the senses listed for our Chinese entries (with the caveat that I'm not sure how extensive these entries might be):

• 綠#Chinese senses focus mostly on the color, with the notable addition of the "black and glossy (especially in a youthful way)" sense.
• 翠#Chinese seems to have a core sense of kingfisher (type of bird), with the color senses arising from allusion to the bird's plumage.
• 碧#Chinese refers to jade, with the color sense arising from the color of the stone.

In the Man'yōshū poems, the 緑 spelling appears to be the most common, so let's look more closely at this.

• 綠#Glyph origin explains that this is semantic 糸 ("thread, string") + phonetic 彔. I've read that the phonetic element in Chinese glyph composition sometimes also contributes semantic information; in this case, 彔 can apparently also mean to filter. Our entry talks about phonetic connections with other words in the Sino-Tibetan family, having to do with a sense of leaf.
• The discussion about midori over here at Language Log also goes into the origin of the 綠 character. One poster mentions an apparent "squeezing" sense, while another talks about the Chinese term's use to refer to "silk".

I must admit to bafflement on how any "silk" semantic connection wound up relating to senses of "leaf" and "green". If the phonetic component 彔 also supplied any meaning overtones from its sense of "filter", I might speculate that this may have originally referred to "filtered (i.e. specially selected) silk", perhaps from there shifting to "young silk", then to "young" and "green"? The phonetic connection with Sino-Tibetan languages' terms meaning "leaf" doesn't seem to fit into this scenario, however. I really don't know what to think about this, and Chinese etymologies are currently outside of my realms of expertise.  :)

Assuming just the straightforward case of Chinese 綠／绿 meaning "leaf" back in the 400s to 700s, the period of most active borrowing of Chinese characters to write Japanese, then the semantic overlap with a Japonic term meaning "bud; shoot" and "green" is easier to see.

Japonic-ness

Separately, I ran across speculation that midori was somehow not Japonic, since it has three morae. This is a mistaken analysis -- the number of morae do not define the "Japonic-ness" of a term, and instead is an indication of whether or not the given term might be directly descended from a single integral Japonic root term: Japonic roots have (so far as I know) all been reconstructed as one or two morae in length. As outlined above, modern Japanese midori is likely derivable as an ancient compound. I have seen no credible suggestion that this is a non-Japonic term, which by definition would mean that this were borrowed from some other language. I doubt that midori is from a borrowing, in part as we can trace this term both phonetically and semantically to a reasonably likely native derivation, and in part as we have no proposed donor term. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:13, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

ахосал

Any idea on what the Yiddish term could look like? All we have is the Belarusian term, which claims to be from Yiddish. *אַכאָסל (*akhosl) is just something I came up with on the spot, and the spelling could possibly be closer to something like חתל. And no, I could not find axosl in the Belarusian-Yiddish dictionary. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 21:43, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Okay, here's my theory. On the Slounik page (and several other Belarusian dictionaries), it states that one of the definitions of the Yiddish word is жанішок (žanišók). жанішок (žanišók) is a diminutive of the word жані́х (žaníx, “bridegroom”) (cf. Russian жени́х (ženíx), женишо́к (ženišók)). Yiddish speakers in and around Belarus may have seen this word and calqued it into Yiddish, i.e. חתן (khosn, “bridegroom”) + ־ל (-l, “diminutive suffix”) = an unattested *כאָסל (*khosl) or *חתל (*khosl), however you want to write it. This then gets univerbalized with the indefinite article אַ (a), possibly in Yiddish, but more likely in Belarusian, where Belarusian speakers (who didn't necessarily also speak Yiddish) heard a khosl and perceived it as one word. I also found someone using ахосл (axósl) and ахосэл (axósel) as variants of ахосал (axósal), which is even stronger evidence that the last syllable does indeed come from Yiddish ־ל (-l). I also read on some forums that the word has a negative connotation, but I can deal with that later with some usage notes or something. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 22:38, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Would the ⟨n⟩ of khosn be dropped just like that?  --Lambiam 17:00, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Well we do have a known case of word-final "n" being switched for "l" as a diminutive, which is קערן (kern) to קערל (kerl). And in general Yiddish abhors forming -l diminutives with words ending in "n", often placing an extra consonant between the two, as seen in the better-documented diminutive of חתן (khosn), that is חתנדל (khosndl); as well as the diminutive of באַן (ban) being בענכל (benkhl). So it's not implausible, although in this case I would imagine khosl to be highly dialectal and possibly somewhat obscure, since I can't find it in any of the dictionaries I can access. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 23:57, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

@Insaneguy1083 you probably already know this, but it's worth noting that either "a" in the Belarusian term could point to an original "o" that's in an unstressed position. I don't know if that's helpful. Chernorizets (talk) 09:42, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

This is the Language Help website of the Linguistics department of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences: https://daviedka.bnkorpus.info/. There's an email there where you can send a question about the language. Chernorizets (talk) 10:55, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

brocail

Dropping this here in case anyone else with Celtic knowledge wants to give it a go. I don't want to definitively claim that it's borrowed from either Italian or English broccoli without a source. Especially when the root of "broccoli" is Proto-Celtic, and has other Scottish Gaelic descendants, including the adjective sense of brocail relating to badgers, once known as brocks. I feel it's probably a later borrowing, given that the vegetable is a fairly recent development, but... better to be vague than to be wrong. Qwertygiy (talk) 02:45, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm perfectly comfortable saying the Scottish Gaelic word comes from English from Italian without a source. The application of this root that originally meant "badger" to a vegetable of the cabbage family happened within Italian, not within Celtic, and it isn't even 100% certain that Latin broccus (“buck-toothed”) comes from Proto-Celtic *brokkos (“badger”) anyway. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:31, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Wend – Gwyn

In what way is Wend a “Doublet of Gwyn” (and vice versa)? Seems to me the two terms are completely unrelated (even if the former ultimately derives from Celtic – which is not mentioned in its entry). // Silmeth ^@talk 10:46, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

They aren't, I'm removing it. Wend is more closely related to Venice, though I'm not sure I'd call them doublets either. —Mahāgaja · talk 11:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps the editor wanted to note that Wyn and Gwyn form a doublet.  --Lambiam 12:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Piss off and Anpissen

Is it any connection between these two? If they are related, it looks like German one is older, as it has the original meaning still. Is there any book on the subject? Tollef Salemann (talk) 06:13, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Likely not, at least not a direct. Both of them look lik pretty spontaneous coinages, especially the German. In a similar vein, English has "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining." Wakuran (talk) 09:48, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

According to Etymonline, bugger off and fuck off are from the 1920's and piss off from the 1950's, although it's very likely they just weren't written down for quite some time. Wakuran (talk) 09:54, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Why not verpissen anyway for “to leave”? But as Wakuran said, probably a coincidence. Likewise in the “to annoy” sense there appears a similar sense in piss on, and in MLE one often says onpissed, which in spite of its frequency I have not created as I am unsure about the lemma verb (dunno why web hits are lacking), though an adjective itself is warranted as pissed off, and now I think the verb piss off might be backformed. Fay Freak (talk) 10:49, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Teo

I have a question about this Vietnamese word. Is "teo" originated from "tiêu" (消)? 2402:9D80:249:591E:0:0:38D6:6F10 10:44, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

If this is teo, the answer seems to be yes. Wakuran (talk) 11:30, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

קרעבס

Again, are we certain that this was borrowed from German? This seems very reasonable to inherit from Middle High German krebz, krebez, krebeze. I found the variation קרעפּס (kreps) but it's unclear which one is the more common one to me.

(FYI: Weinreich 1968 uses קראַב (krab), and has neither kreps nor krebs.) Insaneguy1083 (talk) 13:50, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Not certain, but it's pretty reasonable to assume this, since it seems to be a marginal word. E.g. I couldn't find it as a word on its own in Abelson, only in compounds. Thadh (talk) 15:15, 31 October 2023 (UTC)