Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2022/May

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← April 2022 · May 2022 · June 2022 → · (current)

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Deverbal Adjectives

I would hope that more information is given to the recognition of deverbal adjectives (even if technically, they might only be defined as such, that is that only through folk or a rough etymology (understandable to a fluent speaker of a language). This is because in some German Wiktionary entries, the use of the label, deverbal adjective, helps greatly to reduce the total initial axioms or important lexemes, that the language branches from. Further links like denominal nouns are often shown in the etymology, at least for German words. ADDSamuels (talk) 09:45, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm specifically referring to past participles, used as adjectives, in German ADDSamuels (talk) 09:46, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Can you explain in more detail in what way it will be helpful to label (for example) the adjective verschwunden as deverbal? Which axioms (?) or lexemes might thereby become unnecessary?  --Lambiam 13:11, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

That's a really great example, but often I don't find them, perhaps there need to be a bot, like compare gelöst or gewesen. ADDSamuels (talk) 14:51, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

It's helpful, since if I just need to remember verschwinden, it's irregularities, and then the adjective is almost free. ADDSamuels (talk) 14:52, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

If you can remember verschwinden, you can use Wiktionary to find its past participle. Is that made easier by labelling verschwunden as a deverbal adjective? I don’t understand where the supposed advantage comes from.  --Lambiam 15:40, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm an awful explainer. On the pp (past participle) page,if the pp is an deverbal adjective, then it should explain its link to the main verb (like verschwinde does to verschwinden) ADDSamuels (talk) 18:01, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I think it makes it somewhat easier, because when I was learning German for the first time, I was a little confused by it. ADDSamuels (talk) 18:02, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

It now says for the adjective: “Etymology / Derived from the verb verschwinden”, and for the past participle: “Verb / verschwunden / 1. past participle of verschwinden”. What more is there to wish?  --Lambiam 08:02, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Nothing but this should be the norm methinks ADDSamuels (talk) 10:02, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Duden does this too with adjectives. For another example, the vocative PoS header removed from Latin seems different, because an adjective can lead to a different translation.

This seems even more useful in a multi-bilingual dictionary but it also makes for redundant effort when definitions could be basicly the same (depending on how complicated the translation strategies need to be in each case). Syntax theory seems to be split between a single underspecified PoS (Participle, IIRC). I suppose, since participles other than the ge- forms are less marked, they might be more often attributive and liable for is-relations, depending also on how transparent the stem is. ApisAzuli (talk) 01:46, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

עמעצער

Somebody knows what is the source for the etymology? I tried to look some sources, but I was unable to find it. Thanks! Cymelo (talk) 11:39, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Don't know a source, but it does look plausible. The phrase "enweiz wer" is common in MHG, and there are also attested contractions like "neiz wer". The development -nw- > -m- in Yiddish is well-founded as it's also the source for mir ("we"). The only little problem I can see is that it has /ts/ instead of expected /s/ (apparently invariably so). 90.186.72.208 02:00, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Interesting. My knowledge of MHG is really scarce, so I can't judge this etymology. Regarding the origin of מיר I'm a bit skeptical - from what I know, mir already existed as a doublet of wir in MHG, so we don't see the need to posit a sound shift here (I'm not aware of other words with such correspondence, and mir is used for the 2pl pronoun also in Alemmanic dialects). Thank you very much for your reply! Cymelo (talk) 06:59, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, mir is found not just in Alemannic, but in most German dialects. However, it stems from the verb ending -en wir > -e mir. That's what I meant. 90.186.72.208 07:08, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the sound change -nw- > -m- happened, but it happened before Yiddish. Likewise the parallel change of -tw- to -p-/-b- seen in etwas vs. עפּעס (epes) as well as Luxembourgish eppes and Pennsylvania German/Rhine Franconian/Swabian ebbes. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:54, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you both! I edited the the etymology to include your remarks. I was also able to find a source that indeed lists "neiz wer" as an indefiniteness expression. Cymelo (talk) 13:10, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

PS: A possible explanation has come to my mind regarding the /ts/, too. In MHG the fricative "z" /s/ never preceded "w", but the affricate "z" /ts/ commonly did. So it could be that enweizwer ~ neizwer ~ *emezwer developed the /ts/-sound by analogy and the "w" was lost at a later stage. 90.186.72.208 08:02, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

γύρος calque from Ottoman or Modern Turkish?

The Etymology 2 section of γύρος (gýros, “gyro, döner kebab”) states:

“The calque origin is likely to be from Ottoman Turkish rather than Modern Turkish as the dish was likely known to Greece (under its earlier Turkish name name ντονέρ (ntonér)) before the formation of the Modern Turkish language.”

If the dish was known in Greece under the name ντονέρ before the formation of Modern Turkish, this appears to me to imply the (semantic) calquing, replacing a non-native word, occurred later, not earlier. Pinging BassHelal.  --Lambiam 13:07, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

So the Greeks definitely knew this dish from the Ottomans and called it ντονέρ (ntonér) but according to the Wikipedia page the name change happened in the 1970s (Wikipedia page here), long after the death of the Ottoman Turkish language and nation. The ultimate source for the word doner in Greek and Modern Turkish is the Ottoman Turkish word, but the calque in the 1970s may have at least partially been influenced in some way by the Modern Turkish word since technically Ottoman Turkish was no longer a language at the time and anyone who criticized the word for being Turkish would have done so under the assumption or view of the Modern lens or viewpoint rather than the Ottoman.

I do believe that the source labelled should be (ultimately) Ottoman Turkish but one cannot ignore or dismiss the influence of the Modern Turkish variant in this regard, whether politically or otherwise, hence why the Modern Turkish variant needs to exist in the etymology.

I hate when politics gets into language like this, makes things complicated and very ugly and removes any shared history these two languages may have had in this one dish.

Thanks for the ping! BassHelal (talk) 13:24, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

ISO 639-3 code uun split into uon an pzh

I received a talk that uun is split into uon (Kulon) and pzh (Pazeh), but I need more comments to take TongcyDai's request, please.--Jusjih (talk) 16:41, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jusjih This was also brought up at WT:RFM#Formosan_Kulon-Pazeh_(uun)_split_to_Kulon_(uon)_and_Pazeh_(pzh); apparently there's some energy/enthusiasm behind the push to split them! And it seems like a valid split; apparently it's the not-so-reliable Blust who linked Kulon to Pazeh, while earlier and more recent scholars than Blust have linked it to Saisiyat instead. (Other 2021 ISO code changes are discussed here.) Austronesier said at RFM that "all (uun)-lemmas are actually Pazeh lemmas", so I guess the thing to do is add uon and pzh, have a bot switch all uun to pzh (and change the headers, categories, etc), and then drop uun, if someone has the time... - -sche (discuss) 17:55, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

@TongcyDai, Jusjih, Kangtw, Austronesier I have added the codes uon Kulon and pzh Pazeh. Once all instances of uun / Kulon-Pazeh have been updated, the code uun can be removed. - -sche (discuss) 20:37, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

@-sche: I think "Pazeh" should be capitalized, but the language name in Module:languages/data3/p is "pazeh". --TongcyDai (talk) 11:25, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Fixed, obvious typo. Thadh (talk) 12:31, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! - -sche (discuss) 00:59, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Yellow Sea

Hey, I was considering the etymology of Yellow Sea as it is currently written, and I was wondering: how would you know if 'Yellow Sea' came from Mandarin or came from Korean? And not knowing that, is it a bias against Korean culture to say that the word came from "Chinese"? --Geographyinitiative (talk) 02:20, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

The discussion below is bizarre. It's a Chinese term derived from the colour of the river and the silt that washes into the sea. The Korean and Japanese words are derived from the Chinese ('sulfur sun' is an incorrect translation). Calling it Sino-Korean reflects that the word may have entered English from trade with the Korean peninsula rather than China proper, even though it's definitely a Chinese (not 'Mandarin') word. Meconium (talk) 23:41, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Isn't the Korean term derived from Chinese in any case? It says "Sino-Korean", and the transliteration of 황해 (hwanghae) looks very similar to the Mandarin pinyin of 黃海／黄海 (Huáng Hǎi).

As for the proximate source, I do think English historically had greater trade contacts with Chinese. Also, the constituent parts may not translate directly as "Yellow Sea" in Korean. For example, 황 (hwang) does not list a meaning of "yellow" except in a collapsed-by-default box, but it does list a sense of "sulfur" which seems connected. But if it is unclear you could also just list both languages. 70.172.194.25 02:34, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Whereas 黃海／黄海 (Huáng Hǎi) literally means “yellow sea”, the literal translation of 황해 (hwanghae) appears to be “sulfur sun”. So the English name is not calqued from the Korean. The Korean name matches the phonetics but not the literal semantics of the Chinese name.  --Lambiam 14:31, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

There's a Sino-Korean reading of 황해 as "yellow sea", though, if you're scrolling through all homonyms. Wakuran (talk) 18:23, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@Wakuran: That's what Lambi said, but tacitly avoided determining that 황 and 해 don't mean "yellow" and "sea" individually. However, I don't think that this would properly disqualify a Korean matrix language participating in the process. The earliest attestation for words related to yellow or golden yellow are incident with the inception of Hanguel. It would be Sino-Korean upto then and the closer to China the more likely allowing alternative readings, in particular if "sulfur" works like "gold", "ocher", "orange" (not to say Mandarine) or "clay" as I will argue. 46.114.36.159 17:43, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

As another angle of attack on the matter, we can consider the earliest attested uses of the term in English. Here are all uses from Google Books prior to the year 1800. The first search result page is basically a collection of various editions of George Staunton's An Authentic Account […] , and there are some different works on subsequent pages. I'm not claiming that Staunton is the very earliest source to use the term in English, but these works seem to focus more on China than on Korea, which leads me to think it's more likely to be from Chinese. Someone with greater knowledge in East Asian languages and history could double-check though. 70.172.194.25 19:50, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

The earliest I saw is from 1739. It is given as the name of a province of the Kingdom of Corea: “the Weſtern [Province] is call’d Hoang hai, or yellow Sea”.^[1]  --Lambiam 10:28, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

The text uses the term chersonesus with the meaning of peninsula, I see. I had never seen it before, so I had to look it up. Wakuran (talk) 11:17, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Λίγυς

Imberciadori notates *(s)lig-u̯és- / *(s) lig-us-́. I couldn't find the last diacrit in the graphical editor and no indication in about:PIE. Is it significant? 46.114.36.159 17:34, 7 May 2022 (UTC) Wait, is that Ayin in place of a Laryngeal to account for Room? 46.114.36.159 17:53, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Tibetan-Chinese cognates

Dear Wiktionary contributors, here are some Tibetan words related to Chinese sinograms in old Chinese pronunciation that I wanted to share with you so as someone could add them into the appropriate entries and make it easier to trace the etymology:

འགྲན་སྡུར (to compete) related to (競 + 揣)

དགེ་རྒན (teacher) related to (佳 + 舊 / 昆 / 舅)

དེ་རིང and ད་ལྟ་ (now; nowadays) related to (是 / 之 + 今 (?)) (睹 + 是 / 之)

Kindest regards

an (Danish)

RFV of the etymology:

Borrowed from {{bor|da|gml|an}} and {{bor|da|da|an}}, from {{der|da|gem-pro|*ana||on, at}}, cognate with {{cog|en|on}} and {{cog|da|å}}, {{cog|da|på}}.

I stumbled on this just now, and I have no clue how to fix it. Not only does it recursively borrow itself from its own language, but it lists another term in its own language as a cognate. This has all the hallmarks of an absent-minded cross-language copypaste gone wrong, but I can't figure out where it came from. The borrowings from Middle Low German and Danish certainly suggest another North Germanic language, or perhaps something else on the Baltic. Pinging @Enkyklios, who added this. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:08, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Basically, all of [2], [3] of [4] states that it's a Middle Low German borrowing in the Continental Scandinavian languages, although it could in some cases also have been influenced by modern High German or English. Wakuran (talk) 00:54, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz, Wakuran: I suspect that {{bor|da|da|an}} is supposed to say {{bor|da|de|an}}. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:11, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense, now when you mention it. My initial thought was that someone would have made a mix-up with the Danish distinction of i (in, preposition) and in (in, adverb), assuming å and an was a similar native pair, but a typo feels more logical. Wakuran (talk) 08:25, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

It's a doublet of Danish å. That's what it should be listed as. ᛙᛆᚱᛐᛁᚿᛌᛆᛌ ᛭ Proto-Norsing ᛭ Ask me anything 10:36, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

The German word an is a cognate of Danish å, på, but it is indeed better to call the Danish loanword an a doublet of these words. Enkyklion (talk) 05:39, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

This is not an etymology-related question, but while we're at it: is there a way to indicate that an only occurs in phrasal verbs? This is at least what I gather from its entry in the DDO. –Austronesier (talk) 19:45, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

We could edit the (only used in lexicalized expressions) description, I guess... Wakuran (talk) 22:30, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

@Austronesier: There is {{used in phrasal verbs}}, like rare enough that I have it found only this year; and an often label is “obsolete outside …”. Fay Freak (talk) 14:29, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Schabefleisch

Opposed to what I said earlier, Schabefleisch is obviously akin to (shish) kebap, cevapi. How? ApisAzuli (talk) 08:37, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Not at all. The Schabe- element of Schabefleisch is related to English shave. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:57, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Right. And heroin is a loan from general German, not at all related to heroine, and the secondary stress is strictly observed and not counterintuitive to the spelling, and that's in recent times!

It is not at all obvious from the dictionary that Schabefleisch refers chiefly to Gyros and Döner, which is ideally made helal from lamb chop, you know, sheep and Ziege, certainly not pork, except that there's not at all as a strict a reason to observe the distinction that superstition to which superstition would hold it. You see, kaban is "hog, boar, pig" and I honestly doubt that could be from Semitic. 89.15.239.76 05:10, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

DWDS [5] has recent quotations that don't really let on the meaning, nevertheless defined as raw meat from the meat grinder. And just as they, like any joe shmoe, will with an infailable sense of certainty etymologize Fleischwolf from Wolf (“Canis Lupus”) instead of the suffix present in threshold, viz. "alteration of *walþuz", they also fail to distinguish Schabefleisch from Hackfleisch, Hack, Hackepeter, Mett, Tartar, etc., as if its all just yuck. I have not in my live seen Bulette described as Schabefleisch, or as made from the same. Although this may be due to regional differences, I have certainly seen and heared Gyros described as such. I'm not sure if the same holds for (frozen, convenience) kebap. It's reasonable that the variation would be greater near the source, especially if ćevapćići is just a different kind of minced meat roll. The center innovates, the peripherie remains conservative (Pisani, IIRC), as a rule of thumb. ApisAzuli (talk) 07:55, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Latin stō (to steal)

What is the etymology? J3133 (talk) 13:29, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

I've added the origin DJ K-Çel (contribs ~ talk) 14:27, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Is this a hapax legomenon only attested from the one inscription written in Old Latin? Does that mean it might not have been used in classical Latin at all? I dont mean to repay hard work with negative comments, ... I just want to be sure we're doing the right thing. Thanks, —Soap— 16:42, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

@Soap: We no longer use Old Latin entries, which were moved to Latin (see Category talk:Old Latin language); stō is in Category:Pre-classical Latin. J3133 (talk) 17:02, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Etymology of (bhasūRī) ਭਸੂੜੀ | بھسوڑی

Any ideas to the etymology of this بَھسُوڑی (bhasūṛī) word. I assume it's related to the term भसड़ (bhasaṛ)? نعم البدل (talk) 18:38, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

This is a total shot in the dark, but could it be related to the Sanskrit root भष् (bhaṣ, “bark, growl”)? Semantic development from "growl" to "quarrel" seems possible. Less likely is a relation to भस् (bhas, “devour”). 70.172.194.25 18:46, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

@70.172.194.25: I would agree with the first part of the root भ (bha), but I'm not knowledgeable enough on Sanskrit to comment on ष (ṣa). The meanings do also correlate. نعم البدل (talk) 20:58, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Etymology of Spanish "macho/macha" in sense "blond(e)"

The entry for macho currently duplicates the Costa Rican sense "blond(e)" across two etymology sections. Presumably, if the adjective is etymologically derived from the "male" etymon, so is the noun, so the noun would in that case belong under Etymology 1, not Etymology 3. However, it is not obvious how the sense "blond(e)" would have developed from the other senses of the adjective. Does anyone know of a reliable source that either explains the development or proposes an alternative etymological source of for the word in this sense?--Urszag (talk) 07:48, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

For reference, Mandinka for example derives "blonde" from a word for "European". So drift to a person's hair color ← a person should be plausible. Any creolization should require commentary nevertheless. ApisAzuli (talk) 16:59, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Hear-ear

Hello, It might be interesting to relate the three following words in Tibetan, Chinese, and Vietnamese: nghe (to listen) from *ŋɛː and 認 (old Chinese pronunciation) ཉན (to listen) both from *r/g-na where 耳 and རྣ་བ (ear) come.

Beijing

RFV of the etymology. (1) Is "circa 1975" appropriate? (2) Is the rest of the wording in harmony with the way big cities are handled on Wiktionary?

I found a mention of "Beijing" in a 1975 book by communists/socialists living in the USA (see Citations:Beijing), and I do wonder if there might be earlier "usage"-level (more than a mention) examples of that same type of origin. If there are earlier "mentions" out there, I'd love to see those too. But in the meantime, is "circa 1975" justified? Also, all the new wording for the etymology is interesting; I'd like to see it checked over if possible and compared to Peking's etymology. This request comes after major revisions to the page that I mostly reverted (in the usage notes) due to insufficient evidentiary basis for claims made. I'm not an expert on some of the claims in the current version of the etymology. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 21:13, 12 May 2022 (UTC) (modified)

Why 1975, I wonder? Seems odd. Hanyu Pinyin was rolled out in the 1950s. ---> Tooironic (talk) 09:06, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

After about ten minutes of searching, I was not able to find anything earlier than 1975 that clearly uses Beijing to refer to the city. An honorable mention goes to this 1910 magazine, which mentioned it as one possible pronunciation of the city's name: [6]. There were several other hits but all of them turned out to be misdated, or were not fully readable (and probably misdated, but I can't check). 98.170.164.88 09:23, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

I added a quotation from 1975: “Beijing Duck? / Combined News Service / Tokyo—Peking will become “Beijing” and Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s name “Mao Zedong” in standard Roman spellings to be adopted by China. The new system, aimed at spelling Chinese ideographs as they are pronounced, will be inaugurated Sept. 1, Japan’s Kyodo news service reported from Peking. China will use the spellings for people and place names when it issues passports and other documents for use abroad, and in printing travel tickets, magazines for foreign circulation and news distributed in English.” I could also find “its editorial Beijing Zhoubao (The Peiping Review)” (1958), “Beijing beer” (1971), “Baiyun beer, brewed in the Pearl River Brewery at Canton, Tsingtao beer and Beijing lager” (1973) as romanizations of an editorial and a beer name. J3133 (talk) 09:56, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Great finds! The 1958 one in particular would be quite impressive if valid, although it's questionable whether it counts as English, since the two-word phrase was transliterated wholesale and rendered in translation as "Peiping Review". Anyway, 1958 is the year that Pinyin was introduced, so it would be unlikely to find anything earlier. The other pre-1975 quotations seem more admissible, although not ideal. 98.170.164.88 10:02, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Hanyu Pinyin may have been rolled in the 1950s in China, but it didn't start penetrating the English-speaking consciousness until the mid to late '70s, which was when English-language broadcasters and cartographers and politicians and so on (at least in the US, not sure about the UK) started speaking of Beijing and Guangzhou and Chongqing instead of Peking and Canton and Chungking. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:08, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Changing from 1975 to 1966- see Citations:Beijing. It is embarrassing that I dated the word to 1975; it may still be more embarrassing that I'm dating it to 1966. Please help me embarrass myself with any cites you all see from 1958 to 1966, including non-English cites. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 10:33, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Okay, now I have a more refined version of the original question I posed here. Seeing that I did find what can only be described as "mentions" of "Beijing" in 1958 (see Citations:Beijing), mentions that I would describe as "English adjacent", should those mentions change the date of origination of 'Beijing' to "circa 1958"? Also, still hoping you all will find some 1958-1968 usages of "Beijing"-- I have a few mentions of various quality. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 16:02, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Romance *ad poenam

The romance cognates meaning "barely" Italian appena and French à peine are reconstructible back to Proto-Romance */apˈpena/, in Ibearian-Romance Spanish apenas, Portuguese apenas and Catalan a penes back to */apˈpenas/.

Here we see their etymologies reference back to Latin Latin ad paene, explicitly denying the folk etymology from Latin ad poenam (though inconsistently, crf. Catalan pena referencing a penes in derived terms). The direct etymology from ad paene doesn't account for several unexpected traits in the descendants:

1. the -ae- would develope into */-ɛ-/, where we actually find */-e-/;
2. the last vowel would have been */-e/, where we actually find */-a/;
3. in the Iberian-Romance words, the word-ending */-s/ would be unexplainable, since it would be attached to an adverb, while as for poenam it could be just the plural poenas.

A more plausible etymology would seems to be deriving from Vulgar Latin *ad poenam/ad poenas, and semantically from paene, originated as a confusion between the two similar sounding words.

I haven't been accounting Balkan Romance terms Romanian până and Aromanian pãnã, since I'm quite confused by the use of ad as a post-position, pretty unfamiliar with these languages (though I know the -â- in the Romanian term must derive from */-e-/ and not */-ɛ-/), and also because of their semantical difference (they mean "until", and not "barely").

This is a similar situation to the one about *ad ipsum, so I suggest it to be dealt in the same way (see Wiktionary:Etymology_scriptorium/2022/April#adesso_in_romance_languages).

Catonif (talk) 09:09, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Compare Polish ponad (eg. "beyond", *d < *tóm) vs. Latin pōne (e.g. "after"), Ladin pona ("then, later", no etymology but synonyms, "dò; dapò; dapodò") vs. Homeric ὑπό ("(of time) just after", accusative), Persian افدم (afdom, "last, end", apparently cognate with the Polish, not to mention Latin ab and pōno, pōne², s. v. *h₂epó, *h₂pó). The *z could as well relate to Sl. *s < *kʷ.

As Bichlmeier relates (w.r.t. the Сава / Σάουος) "roman. /ǎ/ [...] in slav. /o/", eg. Parentium, pòreč. If this could lead to hypercorrections in strata close to the contact zone, while a folk etymology already shows that o was understood?

If /o/ was targeted because /ǎ/ was not available, it could not go back to that, but some other 'a'. For semantics I imagine a Goodbye and that post position indicate a change of PoS, "later", "laters", "until later, CU" (a pro pos CU, see the morphology of apuokas, give a hoot), or that word order is treated differently in Slavic, or Semitic for where ta- is a very frequent prefix and plosives are lax. ApisAzuli (talk) 14:08, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

As regards barely, it used to mean something else, so that's at least not unexpected. ApisAzuli (talk) 14:08, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I'm having some trouble following your message. From what I understand, you are hypotesizing a way more intricate theory involving Slavic languages? The mentioning of Homeric, Persian and PIE completely went over my head. The solution is with great probability way more straightforward. Catonif (talk) 19:58, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Latin poena meaning "pain, hardships" prefixed with ad to make an adverb (cfr. Italian appieno 'fully' from pieno, 'full') would take the meaning of "painfully, with hardships, in a hard manner". The shift from this meaning to barely can also be found in the English word hardly. Latin paene is probably unrelated, it might or might not have influenced semantically this expression, but it surely isn't its direct etymon. And looking back at the Balkan Romance entries, they actually seem rather unrelated. Catonif (talk) 20:07, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

@Catonif: and @Word dewd544:, who was involved in some of these entries:

Quite right that the Italo-Western outcomes reflect an older /ˈe/ (not /ˈɛ/ < Latin /ae̯/) as well as a final /-a/ (not /-e/). We are indeed forced to reconstruct */apˈpena/, a form which is, phonetically speaking, far more plausibly derived from *ad poena than *ad paene.

You are also right to doubt the assignment of Romanian până to *paen(e)-ad, since the expected result of the latter would have been *pină; cf. Latin bĕne > Romanian bine. On the other hand, poena is a phonetically impeccable etymology; cf. Latin vēna > Rom. vână. In that case, there isn't any need to assume a post-fixed ad either.

Are the Balkan Romance forms, which mean 'until', related to the western ones at the Proto-Romance level, or are they independent developments? It's worth noting that even the western forms can have temporal meanings; cf. Italian appena 'recently, as soon as' and Spanish apenas 'recently'. The overall semantic trajectory does seem to mirror that of English 'hardly', considering not only the comparable semantic starting points (harshness/pain > difficulty) but also the borderline-temporal usages of 'hardly' (cf. tens of thousands of search results for the phrase 'had hardly started', often accompanied by 'before' or 'when').

Incidentally, western Romance did experience a fad for non-etymological adverbial /-s/ (cf. Spanish mientras, Catalan donques), so I would not use that in particular as a reason to exclude *ad-paene.

On the whole, I think that Latin paene could have influenced or even inspired the Romance forms that we're discussing, but there is no need to assume it. The fact that paene did not leave any indisputable descendant in Romance is also suspicious. Nicodene (talk) 07:31, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

The Balkan Romance question now seems more intricate and possibly unrelated. On the other hand the Italo-Western *appéna(s) terms can be dealt either by citing the etymology in each page, eg for the Italian appena:

Univerbation of a +‎ pena. Compare French à peine and Spanish apenas.

or by creating the page for the reconstruced Latin adverb, which to me seems tidier and more efficient (since it can group all these terms together easily and could have an extensive etymology section mentioning the possible relation with paene, the semantical evolution and the Western -s without having to deal with a dozen of different pages all containing the same etymology inevitably causing a mess between changes), but I don't know if it's an unusual procedure here and if it'd look confusing to casual users. Catonif (talk) 14:51, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, considering the various Romanian variants mentioned below by Robbie SWE, I'm also starting to question whether până really comes from poena. (Curiously, the REW gives the etymon as Latin porro).

Now it's no longer clear whether we're really justified in reconstructing a Proto-Romance form at all. The problem is that all of the Italo-Western languages have descendants of Latin ad and poena, meaning that any one of them could have invented the combination at a fairly late date, only for it to then spread via calquing to the others.

Here are the results of a brief lexicographical search:

- The oldest example of French à peine mentioned by the TLFi is from the Song of Roland, written circa 1100.

- Per the TLIO (search 'appena'), Italian examples are found from Venice in the 12th century and then Cremona, Lucca, Florence, etc. in the 13th.

- I found an example of Spanish apenas in Gonzalo de Berceo's Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, written in the early 13th century.

- The oldest example of Catalan a penes mentioned by the DCVB is from Ramon Llull's Blanquerna, written in the late 13th century.

In all cases, the term appears at or quite near the beginning of each language's literary period.

It could well date back to Proto-Italo-Western Romance, but how would we know? Nicodene (talk) 07:58, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for all this info, I wasn't aware of all these sources. Anyway, there are a couple of facts hinting to the expression dating back to Proto-Italo-Western. One is that, as you mentioned, the word appears as soon as people start writing in their vernacular. Another is the Western *-s, which means that the term was then treated as an adverb and not as a new expression, suggesting the long age of the expression. Catonif (talk) 10:22, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

True, it's interesting that the /-s/ appears from the very beginning in Spanish and Catalan. (I haven't been able to find an early medieval a pena, in the sense of 'with difficulty', in either.) I think it's reasonable enough to posit a Proto-Italo-Western form then. Nicodene (talk) 18:17, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Wrote the page at *ad poenam. I haven't updated the involved pages since I don't know whether it is appropriate for them to contain something like "surface analysis as à + peine."; though I removed them from the descendants of paene. Catonif (talk) 20:19, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Just a side note regarding Romanian până - archaic and regional forms include pănă, pără, păr (apocope), pân (apocope), pană, păn (apocope), par (apocope), pânî, pâră, pene and pună. All these forms indicate, to me anyways, that the origin of this term is far more complex, but I'll leave it to Nicodene to add some insight. According to DEX, scholars have discussed the possibility of Latin *pro ad as being the true origin, but that theory has been rebuffed. --Robbie SWE (talk) 12:39, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

A few more variants, from the DEX: Macedo-Romanian pînc(ă); Megleno-Romanian pon; Istro-Romanian pir, pire.

The variety of forms is remarkable. Not sure what to make of it all. Nicodene (talk) 09:23, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

The rhotacism is present among some northern dialects (both in Moldavia and Transylvania), as are the "â"/"ă" variations, so this is not something unexpected. However, "pene" is interesting and it could indicate an archaic version. Bogdan (talk) 20:28, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

sjóndeildarhringur

any ideas of this Icelandic word? I know its meaning is "horizon", but by its length, I'd assume it's a compound word. --ChofisDan (talk) 00:12, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Looks like sjón + deild + hringur. So "sight division ring", which makes sense to me. sjónvarp is another word that begins with the same morpheme. —Soap— 06:55, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Actually it was in a hidden comment in the RFE template, but the person who put it there may have either thought that -ar was a word in itself or that we needed to explicitly list it in the etymology. But I think when we do this the inflections get in the way and so the tradition is to list the content morphemes. e.g. we dont list every -s- in our German compounds. —Soap— 06:57, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

@Soap: actually, we do (at least for a lot of them). —Mahāgaja · talk 08:47, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

The genitive singular of deild is deildar. It is IMO simpler to analyze -ar as an inflectional suffix than as a compositional interfix. Compare e.g. hvítlaukspressa, in which hvítlauks is the genitive singular of hvítlaukur, and rafeindasmásjá, in which rafeinda is the genitive plural of rafeind.  --Lambiam 07:09, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

To the contrary, hvit- is not inflected for gender in these, and the n from oblique case in the nominative of sunshine must have fossilized very early, too (see Norn sjin, by the way). In German, where the same pattern exists, empirical research has shown that speakers are ultimately uncertain about usage of Fugenelement. Here it is problematic in particular because, as deal (“to distribute”), Teil (“share, piece”) the second d of deildu looks like it was from "do" or other aorist on account of the reduplication in the exponent of the past tense (so, if your haircut goes wrong you could say that's a hair-doodoo? Cp. doodad?). ApisAzuli (talk) 04:52, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

I made no reference to any inflection of hvit for any aspect, nor to gender. For the rest, I cannot make head or tail of your “contribution” to the discussion.  --Lambiam 11:33, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

You are not alone in that... Nicodene (talk) 14:22, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

My initial idea was that the -d of deild was related to English -th (no longer productive) Used to form nouns from verbs of action., but it'd seem Icelandic generally has ð in these cases. Wakuran (talk) 13:03, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

It indeed is. -ð expressing itself as /d/ after /l/ (and /n/ as well) is regular. ᛙᛆᚱᛐᛁᚿᛌᛆᛌ ᛭ Proto-Norsing ᛭ Ask me anything 20:04, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

It is the feminine form of the past participle of deila, so it is like English dealt, but nominalized.  --Lambiam 13:17, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Actually Icelandic might have /d/ after an /l/ because of a very early Germanic change (see for example kuldi "cold"), but that probably has no bearing on the entry here .... i just wanted to point it out for the sake of completeness. —Soap— 14:36, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

harmi

https://sanat.csc.fi/wiki/EVE:harmi claims a completely different etymology and doesn't even mention Häkkinen, whose etymology we have. --Espoo (talk) 14:24, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

That EVE link has the etymology for an unrelated but homonymous dialectal harmi (“gray animal (such as a horse)”). — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 20:31, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks --Espoo (talk) 11:52, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

-éen

RFV of the etymology. This seems extremely dubious. 70.172.194.25 18:57, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

This is obviously the etymology for the missing French suffix entry, but I have no idea where @Malcolm77 got it from. I can't find anything like it in any French entry, which, given the French language code, "fr", would be the likely source. It's probably questionable even for French @Nicodene.

At any rate, it's blatantly, completely wrong as it stands: a Dardic language like Phalura doesn't borrow verb-inflection morphology from a Latin-based adjectival suffix. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:57, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I've just removed it as it's clearly the etymology of a different suffix in a different language. Even if an entry for the French suffix is made, the etymology would need to be rewritten more succinctly, so it's really not worth saving. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:03, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

For French it's there in words like coréen, lycéen, méditerranéen, adyguéen, etc. It seems to be a variant of -ien that applies to nouns ending in -é(e).

Edit: I now see that's exactly what Malcolm77 said. The information that he added is actually quite useful and well-researched, despite the (perhaps accidental) placement in a Phalura etymology. Nicodene (talk) 20:37, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

From the examples above, I'd say that the allomorph of -ien in these words is -en, not -éen. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:42, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

In general, yes. However, the ending occurs in some cases where the base noun doesn't have -é(e). Other than the examples provided by Malcolm77, there's also ghanéen < Ghana, augustéen < auguste, and cyclopéen < cyclope. Nicodene (talk) 21:28, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Since méditerranéen is actually from the proper noun Méditerranée and only indirectly from the adjective méditerrané, one might argue that in this adjective the suffix has allomorphed into -n :).  --Lambiam 06:24, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Augustéen, cyclopéen, and guadeloupéen, goethéen, nietzschéen, etc are not very persuasive IMO because the suffix could still be -en (as in arachnéen from Greek arachné, etc) as Mahagaja says, + a change of the first e to é to prevent a sequence ee, which French otherwise seems to prevent by dropping the first e (as when adding -eau or -elet(te) to words ending in -e). In lycéen, coréen, etc it seems even less parsimonious to assume the é is from the suffix when it's already inside the base word. But ghanéen, kafkéen, ajaccéen, confucéen, and the accréen which fr:-éen mentions are more persuasive. - -sche (discuss) 21:17, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Providence Plantations

Wikipedia has some uncited statements saying that there was a particular colony on the mainland called 'Providence Plantations', maybe sometime between 1636 and 1644. But the 1644 charter (Providence, in Encyclopædia Britannica), which I had taken to be the origin of the term 'Providence Plantations', specifically includes two areas not on the mainland (Portsmouth and Newport). Then, on top of this, Lexico says that 'Providence Plantations' means "The mainland portion of the state of Rhode Island." [7]
My issues:
1) There is a pluralization here, presumably not a mere dummy plural- what are the specific "plantations" referred to? I had assumed that there were three plantations (colonies): Providence, Newport, and Portsmouth, and that they were named for the oldest or most prominent among them.
2) When does this terminology arise? If it does not arise in 1644, it must arise between 1636 and 1644.
3) Anyway, how does this all square with Lexico's definition? I will try to find cites for it, but it may need RFV treatment if I can't. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:40, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

[8] Supposedly, from the initial purchase of land in the Providence area, the place was to be known as Providence Plantations. There is a sentence and a long footnote that skirts around these questions. If that is true, then I still am wondering: what is the referent for the pluralized 'plantations'? Providence and what? Or what parts of Providence? Another: "it [Portsmouth] was one of the four colonies which merged to form the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the others being Providence, Newport, and Warwick." [9] --Geographyinitiative (talk) 18:04, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Some older texts have the singular form Providence Plantation.^[10][11][12]  --Lambiam 13:31, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

Category:Monguor language

Is Category:Monguor language and Category:Mongghul language the same language? If not, what is the difference between them? --TongcyDai (talk) 16:06, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

@Crom daba. Thadh (talk) 16:13, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Seems like Mongghul is considered a dialect of Monguor, from what I can make out. Wakuran (talk) 20:30, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Just to complicate matters, we also have Mongghul (mjg-huz) as an etymology-only variant of Monguor (mjg). Is there any difference between Mongghul (mjg-huz) and Mongghul (xgn-mgl)? —Mahāgaja · talk 22:30, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

According to WT:LT, only the subdivisions xgn-mgr (Mangghuer) and xgn-mgl (Mongghul) are treated as languages, the macrolanguage mjg (Monguor) is not, and the discussion at Wiktionary talk:Language treatment/Discussions#Splitting Monguor into Mangghuer and Mongghul is linked to, where a previous discussion at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2016/December#Splitting Monguor is linked to. In practice, however, we do also have Monguor language as a recognized language with two etymology-only codes Mangghuer mjg-min and Mongghul mjg-huz. I'm working on cleaning this up now. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:47, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

OK, I've sorted it out. I've made mjg into a family code instead of a language code, deleted the etymology-only codes, and sorted everything else into the language codes xgn-mgr and xgn-mgl. —Mahāgaja · talk 09:24, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: Thank you so much! --TongcyDai (talk) 11:21, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

@TongcyDai: You're welcome! If you know and/or have resources about these languages, could you take a look at CAT:Requests for attention concerning Mangghuer and CAT:Requests for attention concerning Mongghul? There were some cases where I wasn't sure which code to apply. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:38, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Early modern characters: ſ and c͡t

Do we have policy on the characters ſ (s) and c͡t when they appear in citations? Oxford English Dictionary just drops them out. I don't see any advantage to keeping them in. Putting them in (or taking them out) is almost always a decision by the printer rather than the author, and rarely relevant to etymology. A quote like, "As diſloyal ſubjec͡ts : by theſe, that they might give him up more ſpeedily into the enemies hands" strikes me as an odd solution. Fairnesscounts (talk) 19:15, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

The ligature ct is entirely stylistic and should always be ignored in any context. I believe there is also a policy that we don't include long S variants, but I may be wrong. Not sure whether that extends to quotations, either. Theknightwho (talk) 22:59, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

You are right about c͡t, and it especially should not be expressed with a tiebar, which is entirely wrong as a Unicode encoding. Long s is a different matter; we don’t include it in entry names, but we allow it in quotations. Different editors disagree on whether to use it or not in that context; see Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2018/April#Long_ſ_in_quotes among other discussions. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:44, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Modern English includes ſ as an outdated but integral component of English written communication. It looks unusual to those who don't know about it. I remember seeing if for the first time in a hand-written signature of George Waſhington. The "English" language header on Wiktionary includes more than Internet Age English. Wiktionary documents everything, not just the new cool stuff. If you can add the form used in the source, do. If you can't or don't want to, oh well. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:10, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Long S being encoded is more down to it having been encoded early in Unicode than anything else, as it is also stylistic and occurs in a very predictable way (though the rules differ somewhat between languages). Were it being encoded now, it would probably be done with some kind of modifier rather than as a specific character in its own right, and although I see its value of using it on places like Wikisource, I'm not so convinced we need it here. I agree with @Fairnesscounts that it is likely just going to distract people.

Obviously that has no bearing on instances where the long S is genuinely necessary to convey the point, such as the example @-sche mentions. Theknightwho (talk) 08:24, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

In the past, long vs short s were theoretically (contrivedly) contrastive in a few minimal pairs, the classic German example being Wachſtube (Wach+ſtube) vs Wachstube (Wachs+tube), which may have helped ensure it was encoded; I know that's a metric Unicode uses when deciding whether to encode manuscript "variants". - -sche (discuss) 21:46, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

As others said, these aren't allowed in entry titles (except for the entry on ſ itself), just like entry titles don't use fi ligatures (Talk:fisherwoman), etc. In quotations, long s is neither forbidden nor required. (In rare situations like windfucker#Etymology, it is necessary or at least helpful to write forms with long s, when directly discussing the difference between long and short s or the confusion between long s and f.) - -sche (discuss) 01:14, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't have much trouble reading an elongated S in original texts. But the ſ character doesn't strike me as a good solution, and least not when the context leads you to expect modern characters. It causes the reader to focus on a style issue that is unrelated to the point we are trying to make.Fairnesscounts (talk) 06:13, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

I support "neither forbidden nor required", because I don't want to exclude people who can read a 'long s' but don't want to type it into a quotation. I was filled with righteous outrage by the removal of 'long s' here: [13]. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 21:51, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Thermit

According to the English entry, the word is derived from Ancient Greek θερμός (thermós). The word is probably a coinage or a brandname, but by whom? Did the inventor Hans Goldschmidt call it that? brittletheories (talk) 08:28, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

It was a German trademark, orginally registered in 1900.^[14]  --Lambiam 23:58, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

The etymology of -iťь in proto-Slavic

I was wondering what the etymology of the suffix "-iťь" was. On the page itself, the section is left blank. The suffix "-h₂ti" seems to be an ancestor of "-iťь". I also found "-éh₁ti" to be very similar. Cheesypenguigi 17:57, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

The semantics don't seem to match at all, however. They have completely different functions. Wakuran (talk) 19:47, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

I am not an expert in proto-Indo-European, but were there any diminutive suffixes? Cheesypenguigi (talk) 21:39, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

There's -lós, but possibly the diminutive function only appeared in the daughter languages. What's more problematic is that for your proposed derivations, the PIE roots are verbal suffixes, while -iťь is nominal. Wakuran (talk) 22:32, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Maybe borrowed from Latin -īcius as in fictīcius; this suffix became oftener in Late Latin. Contrary to Serbo-Croatian where it is the most usual diminutive suffix, in East Slavic it accordingly is mostly encountered in patronyms/surnames as in Roman gentilic names; in the Middle Ages the current East Slavic naming scheme was yet to develop and note that (as I recount from my memory) the patronyms weren’t fixed until the 17th century but one had an idiom like пишется через -вич to say that somebody is upper-class, i.e. apparently someone with imported custom. I have not had enough entropy of Polish to recall how its alleged descendant is used there, maybe @Vininn126 knows. Fay Freak (talk) 13:00, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Polish reflexes of this suffix are exceedingly few. Instead, true *-c and *-ov based suffixes survive. Any sort of -icz suffixes were likely borrowed through surnames. Vininn126 (talk) 13:10, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

wasp

Can we add a reference supporting the metathesis of ps-sp due to Latin influence ? Otherwise, to my knowledge, Old, Middle English -ps- in native words invariably becomes -sp- in Modern English (cf grasp from Middle English grapsen), as final -s is associated with various inflectional endings like the plural. (?) Leasnam (talk) 19:41, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Here is a source that contrariwise states that the Latin and English metatheses appear to be independent: [15].  --Lambiam 10:47, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

The Latin influence is mentioned by Philippa (Etym. Woordenboek), Pfeifer (Etym. Wörterbuch), etc., though they do not necessarily say that Latin caused the development. Be that is it may, the main problem with the "wasp"-word in Germanic is that the form *wapsō that we reconstrue, shouldn't exist in the first place because of Primärberührung. 92.218.236.92 19:42, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

"Reconstrue"??? —Mahāgaja · talk 20:43, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Enanthem: "en" meaning "inside" or "intensive"?

On the page for enanthem, the "en" part is glossed as "intensive", but I followed the link, and the entry for "en" (Greek) gives "in, on, at, among". Should the page for enanthem be corrected, or maybe "en" indeed sometimes means "intensive"? --CopperKettle (talk) 03:34, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

I changed it to "in". I suppose ἐν- (en-) could sometimes be an intensive prefix, but mostly it means "in". —Mahāgaja · talk 08:11, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

wꜥ, wꜥj

Each of these entries circularly says it's derived from the other. (If it's not possible to tell which came first, perhaps we should at least hedge, like starting the etymologies with something like "Formed as if from..."). - -sche (discuss) 03:11, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

I’ve added in some hedging, as unfortunately I think it’s quite unlikely the question of direction of derivation can be satisfactorily resolved. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:10, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Cleanup? opdukke and opduiken

Discussion moved to Wiktionary:Etymology_scriptorium/2022/June#Cleanup? opdukke and opduiken.