Talk:Tanacetum
The translation tables need Berber forms
edit@Metaknowledge: This is a hard one. Maybe you know fitting Berber forms for this universal plant. This is a medieval corruption and Tagetes of the same family I have already wholly explained as Berber. Too early for it to be, due to the largely Asiatic home of the genus, a Turkic borrowing, the similarity to Kazakh түймешетен (tüimeşeten, “tansy”) is hardly because of that and it is probably not old, it is a derivation of the pan-Turkic түйме (tüime, “button”). But is it a coincidence that the tansy is also called barbotine in French, do we find the name of the Berbers in it?
Whereas it is known that Berbers where the bulk of the population of the Northwestern African coast, a Barbary coast until relatively recently, and like there are Semitic borrowings in Latin and Ancient Greek there naturally also passed some Berber names of plants and pharmaca during all of history, notably Latin tamarīx and Ancient Greek μυρίκη (muríkē) and later Latin buda, also seemingly inherited from Late Antiquity Portuguese and Spanish tamujo.
But from the invasions from the late 7th century there was no end of supply of Berber words to Southern Europe. Fittingly Genaust, Helmut (1996) “Tanacétum”, in Etymologisches Wörterbuch der botanischen Pflanzennamen (in German), 3rd edition, Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, →ISBN, page 628, mentions that the first attestation is as tanaceta in a poem by early 8th-century bishop of Milan Benedict (we will have to sort the vernacular names under it).
Tanacetum, like Tagetes, usually foils Eurocentric philologists, and the resemblances given at tansy seem helplessly vague and obscure: the derivation from ἀθανασία (athanasía) is semantically intransparent and phonetically/scribally difficult ot relate – rejected also by Genaust; what “thannus” is I don’t know, maybe they mean a byform of θάμνος (thámnos, “bush”), but it isn’t much a bush. Genaust finds as best a derivation of taenia (“tapeworm”) due to its use against them, however the fitting forms are not found. And yet we also have the prefixed form atanacetum. Fay Freak (talk)
- I'm sorry to say that I'm not nearly well read enough in Berber studies to be able to help; although I agree that the form looks very much like a feminine noun, I have not been able to find it. (I would have expected something like Central Atlas Tamazight ⵜⴰⵏⴰⵙⵜ (tanast) from the root for "copper"; that word does exist, but it refers to buckets and water clocks.) By the way, I question your guess about barbotine — but the French entry could use some attention. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:56, 16 August 2020 (UTC)