Talk:لوز

Persian etymology

@Fay Freak The diphthong in the Persian word suggests that it was borrowed from Arabic instead of being inherited directly from Middle Persian. Are there instances of inherited words with a diphthongisation of Middle Persian ō? — فين أخاي ^{(تكلم معاي · ما ساهمت)} 10:39, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

@Fenakhay: That’s what I too suspected. Further, that c in the Middle Persian actually possibly stands for č, which can come out z in Semitic, even geminated as in the example of قَزّ (qazz) / خَزّ (ḵazz), and I note in particular زَنْبَق (zanbaq) which has before my discovery wrongly been claimed to be from the Neo-Persian. The alleged Indo-European relations I of course won’t believe until we have a well-supported Proto-Iranian reconstruction. Strange enough that Nöldeke, Theodor (1910) Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft‎^[1] (in German), Straßburg: Karl J. Trübner, page 43 (Menadoc is right now down) speculates about the diphthong in the Ethiopian descendants ለውዝ (läwz) coming from a diphthong developing in Aramaic, and Leslau uncritically takes over the Aramaic derivation, or even that it would be analogically from ገውዝ (gäwz) from גּוֹזָא (gōzā) / ܓܘܙܐ (gawzā) which indeed had – apart from apparently Iranian z – this diphthong at least in Syriac (ignore the IPA at the Hebrew spelling, 334a just converted Syriac words into Hebrew spellings even if they only ever existed in Syriac, and this is our bulk of “Aramaic” pages now), which has it probably from the same Semitic motivation as Arabic, while most listed at Old Armenian ընկոյզ (ənkoyz), including the Armenian itself, point at ō: There the Persian is given with ō instead of gowz, which is on گوز specifically given for Iranian Persian though in Modern Iranian Persian the word always was extinct (Nöldeke even could not attest it) – the Tajik form listed on گوز as in a few books is probably spurious, in Tajik it is also ҷавз (javz) and other words. But in this almond word the Iranian vowel rather was ū whereas ō in the walnut word, so Nöldeke’s analogy that Aramaic in the almond word too could have developed aw equates something incommensurable. Unless there is Old Aksumite attestation then ለውዝ (läwz) can be declared borrowed from Arabic, and I wouldn’t know that Aramaic loanwords in Ethio-Semitic are more likely than Arabic ones in general. Fay Freak (talk) 11:29, 10 January 2021 (UTC)