Reconstruction talk:Proto-Brythonic/gwɨrð

ShellfaceTheStrange (talk) 17:58, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
 * is an interesting word. It occurs in Old Irish in the St. Gall glosses as (.i. ) and the Milan glosses as  (gl. ); the latter form, which is the one being cited by Falileyev, clearly should be taken as the plural. However, it is very challenging to interpret this as a borrowing from . As is well known original /*w-/ becomes  in almost all contexts, and on the model of  >  we would expect a borrowing from  to end up as beginning with  (maybe ). Additionally,  is an io/iā stem, which does not match the inflection of . DIL instead has  as a derivative of . To this we can add, and we have a perfectly logical in-language etymology for this word; the meaning would be approximately "fresh-like", which is an excellent match for . Acknowledging as well that no other source has  as a borrowing from Latin, it appears certain that Falileyev erred in listing it as such. I would speculate that this might have happened as a result of querying the DIL for , since in the quote of the St. Gall glosses cited there  and  appear directly next to each other, which makes it easy to mistake this as the DIL saying that the Latin word is the source of the Irish one.
 * Thanks for the explanation. I'm content in it living here for future reference. --Gowanw (talk) 21:30, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
 * As is well known, once had a much broader semantic range than it generally does now (for a brief introduction, see Blue-green distinction in language). In Middle Welsh it is used to describe things which we might call blue (e.g. the sky, the sea), green (e.g. grass), and grey (e.g. metal; also compare )., by contrast, has long been used for things within the semantic range of , although in Y Gododdin it is used to describe the colour of dawn (= yellow or blue?). Suffice it to say that if one were to intone to the native speakers that I have spoken with that  and  are synonymous, an admonition would certainly be received. I bring all this up because, in comparison with the remarkably similar semantic range of , the difference in semantics between  and  must stretch back into prehistory. That is,  did not match any one colour term used in (modern) English but instead referred to a range of approximately blue + green + grey, and regardless of the exact meaning  possessed at that time it must have had a range narrower than that of , in a way perhaps comparable to the semantics of  compared to . To that end, referring to these words as synonyms is unwarranted.
 * Synonyms are rarely absolute duplicates but instead only overlap in meaning, and and  do indeed overlap. I really don't see the issue here. --Gowanw (talk) 21:30, 28 December 2021 (UTC)