Talk:기린

Latest comment: 15 years ago by Ivan Štambuk in topic Cognate vs. loanword

Citations:기린#鄭和 アラビア海へ edit

The Citations:기린#鄭和 アラビア海へ strongly suggests that the CJK etymology of 麒麟 was obviously affected by Somali geri six centuries ago, which is highly likely to have also affected Italian giraffa (since w:Medici giraffe in 1486) and hence its European derivatives, perhaps later via Arabic zirafa, zarafa, or the like. The most famous w:Somali giraffe and Somali geri for it is supposed to have surely affected the whole Eurasian continent, de re and de dicto, but not necessarily de se perhaps self-deceptively! -- KYPark (blocked by User:Atelaes) --59.5.239.90 02:31, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Regardless, modern German and Korean words are not cognates, and it would be highly misleading to have them point to each other. You are very well aware that your "cf. German" was out of place, and were warned many a time that such subversive comparisons will not be tolerated anymore. Given your bounteous record in promoting non-existent genetic relationships, edits like these cannot be interpreted as benevolent acts. You could very easily instead of German place any other etymon of hundreds of world's languages which borrowed the word for giraffe from the very same source, but you always seem to choose well-known IE targets. Please stop this. --Ivan Štambuk 02:45, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
Regardless? Why regardless, granted that Somali geri affected both German Giraffe and Korean girin (기린) indeed? Then such German and Korean are cognates indeed by definition, that is, affected by the same etymon! Pleas make clear why such is not the case. BTW, note that my "cf. German" that Atelaes deleted is the German-Somali phonetic comparison vs. English-French-Italian-Arabic zirafa rather than the German-Korean immediate genetic comparison. Most Germanic and Finno-Estonian pronounce the initial like Somali geri. Therefore, both Atelaes' deletion and your excuse for his are obviously overdone at will, for the sake of blind objection and personal attack on me, which is definitely forbidden here! Watch our that you may be accumulating an enormous amount of injustice, unfairness, or harm not only to me, but also to average editors, admins, and Wiktionary itself. Sincerely yours KYPark. --59.5.239.90 05:02, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
Because there's no genetic relationship. The word was borrowed from the same source, so what? So are countless other words in countless other languages, from culturally more expansive languages like Arabic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit etc. German Giraffe and this Korean words are not cognates. Borrowed words don't have cognates, only inherited ones, upon which sound laws operated. Put your "phonetic comparisons" in some Korean mnemonics Web site, no here on Wiktionary. --Ivan Štambuk 13:09, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
Lo and behold! This is where either you all or me should be definitely defeated forever, once and for all. Here I bet you all all my reasons, past, present and future, that you are awfully wrong to insist that way! Go ask others and advise me who else insist as such. I'm sure that this is the very very unreasonable reason why you all have so far persisted in resisting and harassing me so much. Never insist again from your personal POV as before, in the disguise of consensus. But convince me on evidence that your insistence is the "abundantly clear" (in Atelaes' terms) consensus of the admin community. Or you all should desist from resisting any more from now on! Is that "abundantly clear" and fair enough? --KYPark 00:53, 9 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
Kypark, look up a definition of (deprecated template usage) cognate in any historical linguistics handbook. Words that are borrowed from the same source are not cognate. If you look at the translation table of (deprecated template usage) giraffe you'll notice that this particular term was borrowed into most of world's non-African languages, which (of course) didn't have a term for (deprecated template usage) giraffe of their own by then. Etymological dictionaries don't even mention borrowed terms at all, except for the disambiguation cases when the borrowed term can be confused for the potentially inherited one.
Please stick to the topic. --Ivan Štambuk 01:05, 9 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
Agree with Ivan. Putting the cf German in the def line was quite unacceptable, and I stand by my block. However, I would like to note that the bit in the etymology about how the etymon may have influenced European languages is a useful addition, largely because it is very clear and specific (i.e. not misleading). Also, the citations page and the pic at the bottom of the entry are excellent additions. Inasmuch as I imagine I cause you (KYPark) a great deal of grief in my insistence on the removal of misleading comparisons, I would like to say that this entry is currently top-notch. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 05:49, 9 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Cognate vs. loanword edit

In Korean, both 기린 (girin) and 지라프 (girapeu) commonly stand for the idea of English giraffe.

The former girin is maximally six centuries old, while the latter girapeu less than one. That is, the latter 지라프 (girapeu) is a new word, simply derived or borrowed from, hence related or ascribed to, English giraffe. Such a word in hand is called a loanword. Little or no difference nor surprise? Then just borrowed!

In contrast, English shirt and skirt, which are quite different in sound and meaning, are supposed to be not simply borrowed but surprisingly derived or descended from the same ancestor, the alleged Proto-Indo-European, *sker-, meaning "to cut". Such words in pair are called cognates. Little or no difference nor surprise? Then no cognate!

It depends most on difference and surprise to discriminate a loanword from a cognate, while both are surely akin!

Suppose that German Giraffe and Korean 기린 (girin) were independently derived (rather than simply borrowed) from Somali geri as the same ancestor or etymon. Then what should the relationship of the German and Korean realtives be formally named otherwise than cognates?

Ivan, Atelaes, Stephen, and perhaps some others, who have been perhaps too strongly preoccupied by the idea of PIE may still insist that such both are not cognates but loanwords or borrowings, as to be cognates is to be of a linguistic family, syntactically AND lexically, say, IE rather than PIE. So a Korean word and a German word can never be cognate AT ALL!

As most would agree, historicity or diachronicity, hence "historical linguistics," seems to be the most significant feature of the notion of cognate, in sharp contrast with the synchronic loanword or borrowing beyond linguistic family or "w:Beyond Culture" on the one hand, and dialect or sibbling within on the other.

`` The term cognate is not normally used with loanwords. For example, linguists would not say that the English word sushi is cognate to the Japanese word sushi, because the word was borrowed from Japanese into English.`` -- from w:cognate

"Words that are cognates are cousins, not siblings." [1] The notion of cousin strongly suggests the ancestry farther than the father, hence the start of historicity.

Then what makes cognates so different from loanwords in particular? Historicity or diachronicity alone is not the whole story. But it matters indeed as it makes difference in phonetics and/or semantics enough for cognates. The more varied, the more valued cognates.

In a sense, to make sense is to make difference in w:Gregory Bateson's terms, or w:differance in w:Jacques Derrida's terms, if you like. Such is particularly the case with cognates. Put another way, to be cognate is to be surprising. English shirt and skirt are highly surprising cognates mainly because of the difference in meaning rather than sounding.

On the other hand, you need not be so surprised at dialects or sibblings, loanwords or borrowings of little or no difference, say, between Italian giraffa and German Giraffe, between English giraffe and Korean jirapeu (지라프). They make little or no sense of cognate, although they share the common ancestry or nativity, hence literally co-gnate.

In contrast, Korean girin (기린), jirapeu (지라프), German Giraffe, Turkish zürafa, Estonian kaelkirjak, Finnish kirahvi, and so on are true, not-not cognates indeed, granted that either was "Derived from the same root" as currently defined for cognate in Wiktionary, say, Somali geri as the common ancestor or etymon.

There should be no sophistry nor word play here. Depending on the response here, this reason of mine may be estended to the BP or TR discussion. So the relevant or cognizant would better discuss here fully. --KYPark 14:55, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

That definition of (deprecated template usage) cognate was inadequate, so I fixed it in order to avoid further manipulations like you're doing it now.
Your definition of cognate on the basis "surprise" criterion is a joke. We're not that naive.
Kypark: genetically unrelated languages don't have cognates. I don't know which part of that sentence is unclear to you. Those Uralic, IE, Dravidian, Turkic, Korean etc. etymons for giraffe are not cognates. They all just happen to be borrowed ultimately from the same Somali word. To say that they are "cognate" would be acknowledging putative genetic relationship among those families, which would then have to be reflected in some phoneme correspondences, but which there are none. Like you have regularly German-English t-d Tag-day, trinken-drink, Mittel-middle and for hundreds of other etymons.
Your (shocking? why exclamation mark? ^_^) conclusion is correct: within the communis opinio grounds of modern historical linguistics, Korean and German lexemes are never cognate. Within some more radical framework not generally accepted, like Nostratic, there could be (like Huf and gub you have on your user page - those two are actually correlated in Nostratic scenarios). However, methods of historical linguistics don't work that far in the pasts, so those remain potential rather than actual cognates, and are as such suitable to Appendix: rather than the main namespace. I was actually planning one day to make some List of Nostratic roots ^_^ If you're interested, there's a lot of room for collaboration. If you're interested, drop me a note on the talk page and I'll get you a list of needed Old Korean, Old Japanese and Old Chinese forms you might help at, but of which I have knowledge of to create by myself.
But for the main namespace, both 1) loosely applied and misleading usages of the term cognate 2) comparisons of IE and Korean lexemes are not suitable. Please accept that simple fact. --Ivan Štambuk 16:25, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
I am sorry to have used so many exclamation marks. But take into account I am desperately fighting against so many chauvinists around me, like you! (exclamation again).
It is not me but you yourself that throttle your own neck! (exclamation again) Your "joke" is exactly the same as Stephen's "laughing stock" that aims for nothing but "personal attack!" (exclamation again) Atelaes is not that ugly. But both of you are born as such, I fear. I advise you both to give it up soon to your benefit.
I'll make best use of your thesis, famous or infamous, "genetically unrelated languages don't have cognates."
I do doubt how much you are aware what is meant by w:genetics. It would be a real joke if one uses it at will.
Never forget that genetics or the like is never an easy but highly controversial term. This is in fact the highest topic we have to resolve first of all. (By the way I'm glad that you are atheist. But I wonder how deep your understanding were.)
Before you discuss genetics sensitively indeed, you need to understand the following at least, I guess:
--KYPark 15:39, 12 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
Dear Kypark, in historical lingustics the meaning of genetic relatinship is a bit different from that of in biology. Actually the whole idea of using philogenetic trees to represent "language evolution" is a bit misleading, but completely suits the purpose of the definition of the term cognate in most, simplified scenarios. I suggest you borrow from your local library some book that defines basic terms of historical linguistics, and make your self familiar with those, because you again slip into non sequiturs by misinterpretation. Those biology-related links of yours and conclusions based on them are wrong and irrelevant. --Ivan Štambuk 16:03, 12 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
I hope I am not so naive as to be unaware that linguistics is one thing and genetics is another. Simply, however, I am liberal enough to take it seriously that "everything is an analogy" as noted in w:Robert Pirsig's w:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). So I hoped you could also learn a lesson from Mendelian genetics, Darwinian evolutionism, and their syncretism called w:neo-Darwinism so that you could be far and wide sighted.
Surely, both historical linguistics and neo-Darwinism including genetics are long-term processes, hybridizing different genes into a complex trait, e.g., the Hanja word girin (麒麟) as if an offspring inheriting from (1) the Chinese legendary qilin (麒麟) as if the father and (2) the Somali real-life geri as if the mother. No child without both parents mating. I do not believe in the Virgin Mary, but in Somali geri as the real natural mother of the Hanja word girin (麒麟) and as the legitimate ancestor of Sino-Korean girin (기린).
It may be said that Italian giraffa is a loanword borrowed from Arabic zarafa, and Sino-Korean 기린 from Chinese 麒麟. Granted that the Arabic and the Chinese were not simply borrowed or adopted but derived or adapted (or changed) from Somali geri, then the Somali should be said to be the ancestor or etymon of both the Arabic-Italian and Chinese-Korean geneology. Otherwise, what else should it be called?
The Somali and the Korean languages as a whole may be said to be "genetically unrelated," hence different language families. This apparently overarching discrimination should not cast a shadow over "the history of words, i.e., etymology" such that all Somali and Korean words should always remain "genetically unrelated." Words are so easy to cross the linguistic and cultural border. Are they no more than loanwords? --KYPark 15:22, 13 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
No, no more than mere loanwords, regardless of how they were mutated (phonetically, orthographically) when the borrowing occurred, or in the later language change,
Term cognate is exclusively reserved for etymons of genetically related languages, which are believed to have sprung from common source (either attested such as Latin for Romance languages, or reconstructed for unattested ones). Such cognates have well-defined phonetic/phonemic and morphological correspondences (sometimes even the semantic shifts are exactly the same, fun, fun).
Terms "ancestor" and "derived from" can be loosely used metaphorically to describe the process of adopting a word from the same source of another language, not the mother language, but that does not mean that they are cognate in the meaning of the word cognate in historical linguistics, and here in ===Etymology=== sections on Wiktionary.
You might implant fish gene into a tomato and an apple to strengthen their resistance to freezing, but that doesn't mean that both those genes of a tomato and of apple are "cognate", just because they're the same (or very similar). --Ivan Štambuk 15:46, 13 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
``O.E. cymen, from L. cuminum, from Gk. kyminon, cognate with Heb. kammon, Ar. kammun.`` -- from www.etymonline.com regarding cumin [2]
Based on your line of thought, dear Ivan, would you please discuss what's wrong with the above etymological description, for example, by the renowned expert in etymology? This should be terribly wrong, judging from your claim for the term cognate which has been used since 1645, but may have been used as such a jargon at best roughly for a century as you insist. --KYPark 14:40, 16 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
For starters, Douglas Harper of etymonline fame is hardly a "renown expert", and AFAICS, he's not even a trained linguist ^_^. Anyway, the misleading and loosely used wording of the above sentence hardly changes the definition of term cognate. There are many acknowledged ancient borrowings from Semitic into IE (such as numeral for 7 and words for star and bull of popular ones), or Kartvelian -> PIE, or Sumerian -> PIE, and even some that entered all three families from Sumerian and some of common Mediterranean sources, but these are not cognates per se.
Please Kypark, don't waste time (as I suspect you very much do) trying to find such loose usages of a word cognate as supportive to your Korean-IE-Uralic genetic relationship pushing, because they won't change anything. --Ivan Štambuk 01:31, 17 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
It is all the more surprising that an amateur linguist has got such an excellent job done that all the trained linguists neglected. Again you would deny that it is not an excellent job. But I wish you to avoid the unspeakable, and speaking ill of anyone or anything as far as possible. Presumably, Wiktionary is heavily relying on etymonline, good or bad. If I were him, I might do whatever prevents Wiktionary from using the copyrighted contents.
As I conceded before, anyone can define anything as anything else at will. However, such is no more than a technical term, aka, jargon at best. To believe in it is to believe in its "word magic" which was scathed by w:C. K. Ogden & w:I.A. Richards (1923) and w:Ernst Cassirer (1925). --KYPark 16:10, 17 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
Actually, Wiktionary does not "rely heavily" on etymoline, as that content has clear copyright notice, and several people have already been blocked (mostly IPs) from copying content from there. Using etymonline as a reference (e.g. to convince people that (deprecated template usage) god has nothing to do with (deprecated template usage) good), OTOH, is permissible. The only thing that the author of etymonline has done is just copy/pasted etymologies from various books, put it online and placed (c) onto it. Most of the etymological content there and everywhere else, OTOH, originates from academic papers, and such data is hopefully available freely on various places on the Web. --Ivan Štambuk 18:29, 17 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

You are just nitpicking, while escaping from the main feature of discussion, and, far worsely, ruthlessly deleting my new sections on the talk page, highly dubiously because it is "irrelevant content" as hidden in the bar below, which was positively responding to your next-to-last comment on "your Korean-IE-Uralic genetic relationship pushing".

This is really, literally, "irrelevant," do you insist?

Meanwhile, please, anyone advise me what on earth is "irrelevant" on the talk page, which should be the place for the maximum freedom of thought and expression, I presume.

What a vandalism as your usual strategy, as manifested above! Your band used to delete even much-needed entries, simply because I edited them. No more evidence is needed to prove your band's vandalism.

"Presumably..." is almost the same subjunctive mood as 'Suppose...' that should not exhaust your resources any more than appropriate. It is such an illusion or idol as your definition of, and belief in, the mere symbol cognate.

It is quite surprising for an "atheist" and linguist to be helplessly obsessed by something like a theist idol implied by a mere word magically, hence "word magic!" How about ending with this section here, anyway, and beginning with a new section as follows, hoping for a new solution or resolution? Cordially yours --KYPark 14:59, 18 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

It's irrelevant because it's one of your ridiculous attempts to promote the Korean-PIE-Uralic nonsense, this time by trying to invalidate the whole PIE theory (which should then be "doubtful" as any other, by your opinion). Your premise, in the box collapsed above, is simply wrong:
PIE heavily relies on the w:kurgan hypothesis...'
No, PIE does not rely heavily on Kurgan hypothesis; it doesn't rely at all on any Urheimat hypothesis, neither does Proto-Semitic, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Kartvelian etc. These families are very nicely reconstructible without any knowledge of where exactly the common development occurred. Consequently, all your conclusions based on the attempt to discard Kurgan hypothesis or picture it as doubtful as any other are irrelevant.
Kypark, I strongly suggest that you drop any attempts to discuss this matter further. Korean will never have listed IE and Uralic languages' lexemes as cognates in ===Etymology=== sections here on Wiktionary. Live with it. --Ivan Štambuk 19:22, 18 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
In response to
"No, PIE does not rely heavily on Kurgan hypothesis..."

You should know that the prehistorical PIE etymology is not the history or etymology per se of words. Anyone can reconstruct anything like PIE anyway. Where do you find truth?

English day from Old English dæġ akin to Old High German tac. Cognates include Swedish, Danish and Dutch dag and German Tag ("day"). -- [historical]
All these are allegedly derived from the hypothetical common ancestor Proto-Germanic *dagaz from Proto-Indo-European *dhegh- ("to burn"). -- [prehistorical]
Note: The bold-typed above ought not to be omitted so as not to be mistaken for the historical fact, as Korean 마니다 (manida) ought to be defined as "to handle, manage" but never compared with French manier so that this comparison ought not be mistaken for the historical fact between European and Korean.

Simply, etymology traces the evolution of a word all the way farther and farther back to its first use, origin, ancestor, or etymon, e.g., English giraffe < French giraffe < Italian giraffa < Arabic zirafa < Somali geri.

Therefore, the varying degree of neighborhood rather than brotherhood is essentially implied in etymology. Yet I would accept the brotherhood in contrast to neighborhood as follows:

PIE brothers
historiographical divides
  • Balto-Slavic
  • Germano-Nordic
  • Celto-Gallic
  • Graeco-Romanic
  • Indo-Iranic
PIE neighbors
rather geographical divides
  • Uralo-Altaic
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Austro-Asiatic
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Amerind

Neverthelss, the idea of common etymological ancestor like PIE looks like the nine-headed monstor like Hydra. PIE is really such a superreal incorporeal monstor. In a way, it is an instance of phonetic as well as semantic "ambiguity in generality" in w:Colin Cherry's critical terms. -- 14:31, 19 June 2008 KYPark (This signature I had forgot was added two days later.)

My very tough sparring partner Ivan Štambuk blocked me upon the above discussion, instead of responding persuasively if not reasonably, most likely because the last paragraph scathes PIE, as if it were sacred and inviolable. I am supposed to be the first and last to be deleted of, or blocked because of, my edit on the talk page. Was it so scathing? May I be more scathing?

I suspect Ivan Štambuk of enthusiastic support for PIE, hence POV, though most Western etymologists at present may be as such. Needless to say, PIE, the Kurgan hypothesis as its backbone, and the like are no more than a mere hypothesis, hence POV, though its proponents may insist as if it were well established, as an academic consensus or even as a science. I do not care consensus that is less logical, but science that is less polytical. And I wonder if PIE could be a science at all, which is almost neither verifiable nor falsifiable. For example, the following claim:

English day from Proto-Germanic *dagaz from Proto-Indo-European *dhegh- ("to burn").

would never been either verified or falsified for ever. Such is not science, many fear.

It's a shame indeed that Wiktionary is likely to be occupied by various partisans of POV, I fear, behaving like hopeless desturctive vandals, who used to destroy such an entry as 봉황 (bonghwang) ruthlessly, which is equivalent to phoenix.

Anyone, including the admin and User:Ivan Štambuk, is entitled to help oneself but not to hurt others, who in turn are not so entitled. User:Ivan Štambuk and his the admin colleagues ignore this fundamental reciprocal moral principle, hiding behind the admin-ship, not as the Wiktionary's but partisan's shield and strategy. I will witness how far they could go. Go ahead and all gone to hell! --59.5.239.90 13:54, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Kypark, every "discussion" with you ends with your relatively hard-to-read monologues in which you promote your personal interpretations of linguistics, which don't have any support in the broad scientific community. Kurgan theory has nothing to do with PIE language (note the word language, not PIE religion, PIE social structure or PIE war customs - though the linguistic data is of immense help even in all these areas). At this point, I don't really care how much of that simple fact is incomprehensible to you, i.e. do you either 1) deliberately invent false premises such as "PIE's backbone is Kurgan theory" out of which you draw conclusions which are supposed to be supportive to your "alternative" views 2) haven't read enough historical linguistics literature to really understand that reconstructing PIE has absolutely nothing to do with archaeological evidence of some ancient cultures, only with attested etymons 3) are incapable of comprehending anything that doesn't fit your personal beliefs.
Your claims on PIE not being verifiable or falsifiable are so funny. I'll just quote J. B. S. Haldane when some anti-evolucionists (creationists) asked him something like that on the theory of evolution, it being just a "mere hypothesis", "comparable" in explanatory power to holy scriptures: I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.. Now, when Kypark founds, say, a few hundred Germanic lexemes that point to Proto-Germanic consonants that defy regular phonemic correspondences that are otherwise attested in form of Grimm's law and similar "laws", thus PIE */dʰ/ and */gʰ/ not mapping to Proto-Germanic */d/ and */g/ as in the above example, then Kypark will cause some noise in the scientific community, and some theories will have to be invalidated and modified. But since such thing is not likely to happen, Kypark's actions are reduced to some guerrilla arguments on free wiki-media, in which he is wasting other peoples time that could be otherwise constructively spent.
The real shame is that your Uralo-Altaic etymologies have been in the main namespace for more than a year, for people to read and other wiktionaries to copy/past from. But not anymore, Kypark. You join the bandwagon of that same genius that claimed that Mycenaean ma-te-re is the ultimate source of English mother, Lithuanian genius that thinks that baltas is the ulimate source of Latin albus and Ancient Greek alphos, mr. Xur-Bel-Gon according to which prevalently Serbian kašika is from kaša and not from Turkish word which has otherwise basically identical meaning and phonetic value.
Very sad Kypark that you call your opponents "POV partisans" with zero arguments in your pocket, when in fact you are the one promoting crackpot theories. The only reason why I'm responding to this page is not to let same casual onlooker think that you are right. This page is getting locked. --Ivan Štambuk 03:35, 22 June 2008 (UTC)Reply
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