Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2017/July

boterham
Right now the etymology of reads, which is confusing at best as the second part doesn't mean "ham". Philippa calls the origin of the seconds part uncertain while others are happy to go with a meaning like "cut, morsel" (Philippa mentions this of course). Any preferences for a certain approach? Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 13:41, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * If it means something other than just "ham", then are there attestations for that sense? —CodeCat 14:17, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's attested, there only seems to be a mention by Kiliaan. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 14:23, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I think it somewhat rhymes with Bemme. 91.66.71.216 00:42, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Well that would explain bammetje.. W3ird N3rd (talk) 01:18, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

Limburgish bleudse
Limburgish Wiktionary has an entry li:bleudse with the meaning "to heal by releasing blood". This word agrees perfectly in form with 🇨🇬, the origin of 🇨🇬. However, there are no other cognates of this word, and it's not found in any older Germanic languages other than Old English, including any that could be ancestral to Limburgish. Where could it possibly have come from? Is this really a gap in the attestation? I'm not sure what to make of it. —CodeCat 12:51, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * According to Kroonen, there was a Norse settlement near Beek-Elsoo in Limburgish territory. No idea if the dates match up, but if they do it could conceivably be from ON. KarikaSlayer (talk) 19:32, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Nevermind, I didn't see the -eu-. That would make me think it's inherited. KarikaSlayer (talk) 19:36, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * What's the Old Limburgish blöhdhsan they refer to? The spelling looks rather strange (although I admittedly don't know anything about "Old Limburgish spelling".) Otherwise, it could be a secondary derivative. In western Central Franconian there's a form blödije, bledije with the same sense. Not perfectly the same, but similar. Kolmiel (talk) 14:53, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

pooch
The senses "A bulge, an enlarged part" and "A distended or swelled condition" are listed under the etymology "From ", the same as the "dog" meaning, but wouldn't these senses more likely be related to "pouch"? Are they really the same etymology? Mihia (talk) 19:04, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * It might be a homonym sense unrelated to putzig, potsig. It might even be an old spelling of pouch. We can't know unless the author gives a source. The etymology is largely irrelevant for the meaning, though, if usage can be attested. I'm not sure whether the given example would be more likely with pouch and if so, pooch in that sense might be a calque. Especially as a dog name, and given the funny connotation and sound of it, a word play doesn't seem unlikely. 91.66.71.216 00:35, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The etymology may be "largely irrelevant for the meaning" if you care only about the meaning and not about the etymology, but etymology is important and interesting in its own right, and is also the whole basis of the Wiktionary article organisation. It "might be" anything if one doesn't actually know, but, as I now see, various dictionaries agree with me that it is related to "pouch", so I'm going to split the article. Mihia (talk) 00:18, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Can you please add the sources for the second etymology? 91.66.13.99 18:10, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

French ouate de phoque
This is a humorous nonsensical translation of what the fuck, which literally means "cotton wool of seal", but I wonder exactly what type of borrowing this is. We have Category:Phono-semantic matchings by language, but I don't think that's what this is. Wikipedia speaks of "", could that apply here? --Barytonesis (talk) 23:08, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Homophonic translation seems like a good fit to me. DTLHS (talk) 00:39, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Here's another example of this sort of thing. DTLHS (talk) 00:59, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Nice :p --Barytonesis (talk) 13:11, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm not so sure this is really French. I think it's more like : nonsense phrases chosen for their English homophones. It reminds me of the following fake Latin verse:
 * O civili, si ergo,
 * fortibus es in ero.
 * O nobili Deis trux.
 * Vatis in em, causan dux.
 * Which is supposed to sound like:
 * Oh, see, Billy, see 'er go-
 * forty buses in a row!
 * Oh, no, Billy, they is trucks.
 * What is in 'em? Cows and ducks.
 * The usage on Google Books is very limited, and in Usenet is mostly mentions in bilingual contexts- I'm not sure :this would pass rfv as being used in French to convey meaning. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:09, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Mh, maybe not. However, as a French speaker, I think I've heard it before, and might even have used it myself. --Barytonesis (talk) 13:11, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Anyway, I created Category:Homophonic translations by language. --Barytonesis (talk) 13:12, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * There's a whole book of Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames... [[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 06:53, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm also reminded of one my French teacher told me for Latin a long time ago: “Mē tamen amābit” (he/she will love me) for the French “Met ta main à ma bite” whose translation I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. — JohnC5 07:20, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

FEW
Are there any alternative sources for the FEW (Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch)? https://apps.atilf.fr/lecteurFEW/ is down. --Victar (talk) 01:15, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Not that I could find. Given the time and the day of the week, it's a good bet that it's just down for maintenance for a few hours. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:35, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Dang. It's been down for a few days now. --Victar (talk) 01:54, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

struthiocamelus
There is no στρουθιοκάμηλος in perseus (or in the rest of my sources). Does someone has another source? --Xoristzatziki (talk) 23:00, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

struthio
Can someone verify the etymology? --Xoristzatziki (talk) 23:01, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I believe it comes from 🇨🇬, diminutive of . – GianWiki (talk) 21:01, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Please, I asked for verification, not believes. Have you seen any source that states so or is just a hunch? Wikifriendly --Xoristzatziki (talk) 13:27, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Starbucks
I think this information should be incorporated into the etymology :

"Terry Heckler [with whom Bowker owned an advertising agency] mentioned in an offhand way that he thought words that begin with 'st' were powerful words. I thought about that and I said, yeah, that's right, so I did a list of 'st' words.

Somebody somehow came up with an old mining map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbo. As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville's first mate [named Starbuck] in Moby-Dick. But Moby-Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense." — Ungoliant (falai) 12:45, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

or ?
Our entries currently only mention the latter variant (as can be seen in the "What links here" of the page). But De Vaan 2008 has the former variant, as does LIV. Is there any particular evidence for one or the other laryngeal here? —CodeCat 22:33, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I think the Doric perfect form of (that is, the Doric dialect of Ancient Greek for those who don't know),, indicates . It likely has long , because it corresponds to the Attic form .  developed into Doric  but shifted further to  in the Attic and Ionic dialects, while  developed into  in both Doric and Attic–Ionic. So the correspondence of Doric  to Attic  in  and  would indicate that the root contains . — Eru·tuon 00:07, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I wonder what De Vaan and LIV think of this point. They don't even choose the generic H, but specifically h₁, suggesting that there is also positive evidence for h₁ in particular. —CodeCat 00:14, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Do you have Beekes? He talks about the issue, and reconstructs as well. --Barytonesis (talk) 00:21, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Beekes what? I only have his IE grammar thing, nothing specifically about Ancient Greek. —CodeCat 00:22, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * --Barytonesis (talk) 00:23, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * No I don't have that. —CodeCat 00:29, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Whether to mention vowel grades in Ancient Greek etymologies
prefers not to mention vowel grades in Ancient Greek etymologies, and has been removing such mentions, as in.

I think it is a useful thing to mention. Ancient Greek verbal roots frequently have such grades, and explicitly saying so helps readers to understand why, for instance, has a diphthong with  while  has one with. I found it a fascinating topic in the discussions of vocabulary in my introductory Attic Greek course, Hansen and Quinn.

What are other people's opinions on this? I think has also added mentions of vowel grades to etymologies.

What is your reasoning, ? I feel like this has been discussed before, but I don't remember where. — Eru·tuon 23:43, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm not opposed to mentioning it, but I think we should mention it as part of the suffix. After all, it's the suffix that triggers a particular grade. For example, 🇨🇬 always triggers zero grade. The etymology should make this clear; often etymologies seem to treat the different grades as distinct entities that suffixes are then applied to, but in actuality the suffix is primary and the grade a consequence. —CodeCat 23:48, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

говаривать
, from, interests me because it changes to.

This change makes sense in a certain way, because can be analyzed as, phonemically speaking, as if spelled , with the unstressed letters  being pronounced as. So the spelling change must be a result of the stress shift: the second unstressed in  keeps the pronunciation, but receives stress because of the addition of the suffix , and hence has to be spelled , while the other two letters  need not change their spelling. It seems a rare case where an unstressed vowel merger is manifested in spelling (only because the unstressed vowel is now stressed), which is mostly not the case in Russian, as opposed to Belarusian.

Of course, I'm just speculating here. (Not sure if my explanation will be intelligible.)

I see a similar change in a few other words suffixed with (,, , just from the first page of the category), so perhaps it is a regular phenomenon. Unfortunately, I don't have access to sources on Russian phonology. I think there should be some kind of a note explaining what's going on, and a category for words of this type.

Does anyone interested in Russian have more information on this:, ? — Eru·tuon 04:02, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The feature is standard and it's called - vowel gradation; vowel interchange. A few examples are here. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 05:39, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Since Russian  о а comes from (postlaryngeal) PIE *ā and *ō, while  а о comes from *a and *o, I suppose this alternation goes all the way back to PIE ablaut. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:13, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * You have that backwards. Slavic o is originally short, a is originally long. It's the reverse of Germanic. —CodeCat 15:29, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * And you have the reason wrong. This has nothing to do with PIE ablaut, but rather with vowel lengthening. This suffix lengthens the preceding vowel, so о becomes а, ъ becomes ы, and ь becomes и (and maybe е becomes ѣ, but I can't find solid examples of that one). --WikiTiki89 16:50, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Fixed. I did know that, I was just typing faster than I was thinking. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:48, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Ahh, so my theory was completely wrong. Thanks for the additional explanation. (It should probably be added to the entry . I guess it does say changes into, but not why.) I wonder, what is the origin of the lengthening: from PIE or from a post-PIE sound change? Perhaps ? — Eru·tuon 18:15, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * After looking a little closer, it seems that the situation is a bit trickier. I'm currently analyzing a bunch of verbs and will post more information later. --WikiTiki89 18:59, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * It may be common knowledge, not sure, but in regard to Russian imperfective aspect, I think it's interesting that the Russian infix -ива-/-ыва- (very common marker of imperfective verbs, as in гова́ривать) is found in various other Indo-European languages, such as Latin (amābat), Italian (amava), Spanish (amaba), and Lithuanian (mylėdavo. —Stephen (Talk) 19:03, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure those are related. The Slavic *v generally does not correspond to Latin b. --WikiTiki89 20:23, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Balto-Slavic extended the existing PIE lengthened-grade ablaut to include i and u, while also extending it further for o and e. So the lengthening is an innovation specific to Balto-Slavic. I don't know exactly which derivations trigger the lengthening, but it seems you've already found one case. Since this is a Balto-Slavic phenomenon, you should be able to find cognate formations in Latvian and Lithuanian as well. I'm curious if there are any remnants of the o-a distinction visible in this, since these two vowels merged in Balto-Slavic. They should in theory lengthen to ō and ā respectively, and these vowels remain distinct in the non-Slavic languages, so you might find a-ā pairs next to a-ō, revealing the original quality of the short vowel. —CodeCat 20:36, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Germanic also has exactly the /a~o/ vs. /ā~ō/ alternation in class VI strong verbs (shake/shook < *skakaną/*skōk). The obvious place for this contrast to originate is in zero grades with interconsonantal h₂/h₃ (> Gmc. a, BSl. a, Sl. o) vs. full grades with eh₂/eh₃ (> Gmc. ō, BSl. ā/ō, Sl. a). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 07:33, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Vowel lengthenings in certain derivations are very common in Balto-Slavic. As CodeCat notes, this is probably an analogical extension of PIE vrddhi (lengthened-grade) formations. Latin also independently generalized vrddhi into vowel lengthening in certain derivations (e.g. the perfect tense), although it seems more productive in Balto-Slavic. There's also a proposed late-PIE law that suggests that there was general pre-tonic vowel lengthening in many daughters; I forget what the name of this law was but I think it's one of many controversial sound changes endorsed by Kortlandt. Benwing2 (talk) 20:10, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * -ивать and -ывать do mention that they generally change о -> а in the stressed syllable; I added this. I'm not sure if it makes sense to add the etymological origin of this. Generally the usage notes I added for various suffixes take a synchronic approach, and the whole analysis of e.g. говаривать as говорить + -ивать may not be completely valid diachronically. Benwing2 (talk) 20:14, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note also that although the change о -> а is standard, there are some exceptions. One systematic one is with verbs in -овать, which become -о́вывать not *-а́вывать. Benwing2 (talk) 20:15, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

legitimate
What's the point of having two etymologies here? DTLHS (talk) 20:56, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I am no etymology expert, but none at all, as far as I can see. Off topic, I also question the usage note that says "Forms of legitimate are somewhat more common than the forms of the verbs legitimize and legitimise in the UK combined". I have scarcely even heard of "legitimate" as a verb, whereas "legitimise" is very familiar. Mihia (talk) 00:33, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I also see no point in having 2 etymologies either, as the pronunciations can still be shown for each. Leasnam (talk) 01:21, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I grouped them under the same etymology, and had to use the Pronunciation headers to further subgroup the P'sOS. It looks a little odd..., but I guess it works (?) Leasnam (talk) 01:36, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Personally, I think this organisation gives the pronunciation differences more weight than they really deserve. If you don't want to list the pronunciations all under one heading at the top, I would put the pronunciations beneath the PoS headings, not the other way around. Mihia (talk) 01:51, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I tried that initially, and it looked terrible. It put too much space between the Header and the senses and just ended up being too confusing :/ Leasnam (talk) 04:54, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * In that case, I would put them all under one heading at the top, which I see someone has now actually done. Mihia (talk) 13:07, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The etymologies aren't exactly the same, since the verb comes from the adjective by (Category:Conversions by language could maybe be created). It probably doesn't warrant two headers though. --Barytonesis (talk) 12:12, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I think it does. In these situations I always include a separate etymology. Ideally every part of speech should have its own etymology. —CodeCat 12:15, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I strongly disagree with this given the current layout where etymology headings are at the highest heading level. I think it is confusing and unhelpful for ordinary dictionary users. I believe that a high-level etymology division should be employed only for words that are unrelated (or at least not at all closely related) in origin. By all means explain any intricate issues to do with the development of different parts of speech, but under the same header. I guess another option would be to have the etymology beneath the PoS, but then a new way would have to be found to make the major etymology divisions for words that really are unrelated. Mihia (talk) 13:20, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Words with different etymologies should have different etymologies, it's as simple as that. We don't include multiple etymologies in one etymology section. —CodeCat 14:36, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Not if it creates a massive and completely misleading "Etymology 1" / "Etymology 2" top-level heading division for extremely closely related words, that looks exactly the same as the division for unrelated words. Another way has to be found. Mihia (talk) 17:14, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * When two related words have different spellings, we give them each their own etymology. So it makes sense to do the same when they happen to be homographs. —CodeCat 17:30, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but then the presentational problem doesn't arise (because the words are on different pages anyway, presumably). Even so, if a spelling difference is a trivial variation of what is fundamentally the same etymology, I wouldn't repeat the whole etymology in two different places, just as I wouldn't repeat the definitions for mere minor spelling variations. It just makes maintenance more of a nuisance, and things easily get out of sync. I would put it in one place and then have cross-reference from one to the other. Mihia (talk) 17:47, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree with Mihia (and apparently Leasnam and DTLHS) here. A simple "the verb is from the adjective" at the end of the one etymology section is sufficient; compare how we treat cases where later senses are derived by extension from earlier ones. - -sche (discuss) 17:35, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree with -sche and Mihia. It's absurd to have separate etymology sections for each POS in cases where one is clearly derived from the other, especially in isolating and analytic languages like English. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:09, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Me too. DCDuring (talk) 19:51, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree with the above. I realize you prefer it differently, CodeCat, but it might be best to stick with the consensus rather than creating all sorts of inconsistencies. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:37, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

нужда
I've tried to add Old Church Slavonic нѹжда to the etymology of Bulgarian нужда and got an error message telling me Old Church Slavonic is not an ancestor to Bulgarian.

Given that 1. at present, Wiktionary has no language code/template for Old Bulgarian, and 2. Old Church Slavonic is also referred to as Old Bulgarian in academic circles, I wonder what to do.

And while we're at it, OCS also had a parallel form нѫжда. I believe this was just a spelling variant, as ѹ and ѫ had likely been merged in the spoken language at the time.

So... any advice on / help with what to do? --EstendorLin (talk) 23:17, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Not directly related, but you shouldn't use ѹ. Not on Wiktionary, not anywhere else really either. It's a deprecated character. —CodeCat 23:41, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry, copied it from the Sofia University's site where I found the etymology. What should I use instead?b --EstendorLin (talk) 01:29, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * оу —CodeCat 11:19, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm not an expert on Slavic languages, but if OCS is the ancestor of Bulgarian, it should be added as such in Module:languages/data2, where the data for Bulgarian is contained. There may be other Slavic languages that need to have their ancestors listed. I just added Old East Slavic as the ancestor of Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn. — Eru·tuon 23:45, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Also, a code for Old Bulgarian could be added to Module:etymology languages, if editors who know more about Slavic think it is distinct enough to warrant that. — Eru·tuon 23:47, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The problem with OCS is that it's not one language from one area. Writers from all over the Slavic area wrote in OCS, and they continue to write modern CS today. Each of them put their own local twists on it. So to call an OCS document written by a Czech "Old Bulgarian" just isn't right. —CodeCat 00:18, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I know it was used over a wide area, and I wasn't proposing that all OCS be called "Old Bulgarian": that's why I said the code would be added to Module:etymology languages, not to the regular language data modules. — Eru·tuon 00:30, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Sure, the relationship between OCS and modern Slavic languages is much like that between Latin and modern Romance languages. It was a literary language based on the Bulgarian vernacular, but standardized and extended with features from other early Slavic languages. My main issue here is that currently there is no way to add Old Bulgarian etymons. While in the case of, say, Croatian, nužda is considered a loanword from OCS (the regular reflex would be **nuđa), the modern Bulgarian word нужда is the direct continuation of Old Bulgarian нѹжда / нѫжда. --EstendorLin (talk) 01:29, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd support making OCS the ancestor of Bulgarian, just because it was spread across a wider area doesn't change the fact that it developed naturally in Bulgaria. Crom daba (talk) 02:54, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 17:18, 12 January 2018 (UTC)
 * ✅. :) - -sche (discuss) 17:24, 12 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I think we made the wrong decision to make Bulgarian a descendant of OCS. Crom daba says "just because it was spread across a wider area doesn't change the fact that it developed naturally in Bulgaria", but just because it developed in Bulgarian doesn't mean that modern Bulgarian is descended from it. Also, whatever we do with Bulgarian we'll also have to do with Macedonian, since they are closely related, and according to many linguists just dialects of one language. There are even some sound changes that took different directions in OCS and Bulgarian/Macedonian, for example, 🇨🇬 metathesized in OCS to become, but not in 🇨🇬 or Macedonian 🇨🇬 (or any other South Slavic language, for that matter). --WikiTiki89 14:22, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Bulgarian and Macedonian are closely related, but they must have split off before earliest OCS since Macedonian doesn't reflect *tj as št, but as ḱ. If you're wondering, the shift of *št > ḱ is impossible not only phonetically, but also because OCS št merges *tj and *šč, a merger that isn't present in Macedonian.
 * Bulgarian ъl and Macedonian ol are not preservations of *ьl but reflexes of an intermediate syllabic l̥.
 * Some of the isoglosses between Macedonian and Bulgarian may be due to areal influence, Torlakian Serbo-Croatian also shares some of these despite taking part in earliest Shtokavian developments (merger of yers, *ǫ > u, *jego > (n)jega). Crom daba (talk) 15:04, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Regarding "they must have split off before earliest OCS": That is only under the assumption that Bulgarian is indeed descended from OCS, so let's establish that first. You can just easily say that the št itself was due to areal influence, or due to literate influence from OCS. You could also say that the merger of and  was incomplete in Bulgarian until much later. I find that the deep morphological similarities as there are in the verbal and nominal morphologies of Bulgarian and Macedonian are much more indicative of a common origin than a single phonological merger. --WikiTiki89 15:27, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That's just, like, your opinion man.
 * I would have to know a lot more about South-East Slavic languages than I do now to discuss this effectively. On the face of it, presuming continuity here seems more parsimonious to me personally (I trust phonology relatively more I guess), but I see why you'd see it the way you do.
 * So what does the literature say? Wikipedia at least seems to imply continuity. Crom daba (talk) 22:26, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Right, so what I'm trying to say is that we rushed into a decision here without any of us having expert knowledge of the history of the Southeast Slavic languages and without consulting any literature written by such experts. And I definitely think it's better to treat Bulgarian as a sibling of OCS when it's actually a descendant than to treat it as a descendant when it is actually a sibling. --WikiTiki89 13:40, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Fine, but Bulgarian being a descendant of OCS is conventional wisdom due to aforemented shared phonological innovations, and I have never heard of these theories of OCS being basal to Bulgarian and Macedonian before.
 * We could speculate whether these innovations represent literary influence as you did, but I consider this level of skepticism unwarranted seeing as we're dealing with languages spoken on the roughly on the same geographical location, by the same ethnos, and with some level of continuity.
 * One could wonder how many "unproblematic" cases of inheritance could withstand this much scrutiny. Latin and Romance? Sanskrit and Indic languages? Jurchen and Manchu? Even something like Old English and English could be problematized if we were to dwell on the West Saxon standard (when does y back and when does it unround?) 12:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I did think about this with regard to Ancient Greek, since Modern Greek is not directly descended from any of the Ancient Greek literary dialects we know (I might be wrong about this, but in that case, just take it as a thought experiment). So it comes down to what we mean by "Ancient Greek". As I see it, if the direct ancestors of the Modern Greek dialects had been written down, they would have been considered part of Ancient Greek, therefore the term "Ancient Greek" covers the direct ancestors of the Modern Greek dialects. So the question then is this: If we have written attestations of the direct ancestor dialects of Macedonian or Neo-Štokavian, would we consider them to be OCS? If so, then we should treat OCS as the parent of all the South Slavic languages. If not, then we have to further ask ourselves, if we found medieval written attestation of some features of Modern Bulgarian that are not generally considered to be OCS features (such as loss of case, merger of and, etc.), would we consider this to be OCS? If yes, then we need to consider why we said no to the first question but yes to the second. If not, then OCS is not an ancestor of Modern Bulgarian. I hope this logic isn't too complicated to follow. My preferences would actually be to say yes to the first question and let OCS be the parent of more than just Bulgarian. --WikiTiki89 15:22, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * There are South Slavic monuments that aren’t in OCS, like Freising manuscripts. In the second case, yes, we definitely would, because that would be OCS features then, which would spread to other areas with the rest of the language. OCS arose as a written vernacular: the only reason these modern features weren’t a part of it is because they did not yet exist. Guldrelokk (talk) 18:28, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Well let me prod a little further. What makes us say that the Freising manuscripts are not OCS? --WikiTiki89 19:18, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Dialect continua do not really split off unless something causes them to, which wasn’t the case for Bulgarian and Macedonian. The (so-called; they aren’t really a subgroup separate from anything, see Torlakian) Eastern South Slavic dialects are no doubt very close; in no way does this mean that they were identical in the Early Middle Ages, in fact they couldn’t be. Guldrelokk (talk) 09:22, 6 April 2018 (UTC)


 * These are good points, here's the general impression I had of the situation from tangentially related literature:
 * Old Church Slavonic refers exclusively to texts written in the first few centuries, there is only a small corpus of OCS texts and a lot of them are translations of Greek originals (think Ulfias' Bible).
 * Church Slavonic was a literary language of Slavic lands (possibly also Romania?) from Bohemia and Russia to Croatia and Macedonia.
 * This literary language was based on Bulgarian, but adapted to local vernaculars.
 * But there is admittedly some nuance and problems with this simplification, some of which I've only discovered due to this discussion after opening Old Church Slavonic: An Elementary Grammar by S.C. Gardiner. Early_Cyrillic_letter_Shta.png
 * OCS is only attested from the middle of the 10th century and most of the manuscripts are found outside of the Balkans because a lot of the Balkan ones didn't survive the Ottoman conquests.
 * Manuscripts we have are not originals and it is presumed that copyists introduced some of their vernacular as copying errors.
 * Gardner includes as OCS not only texts from Bulgaria but also texts of the Macedonian and Czech recension, some texts with SCr influence and even a latin script text in Old Slovenian (above mentioned Freising manuscript).
 * OCS Cyrillic manuscripts write the reflex of *ť  as щ (Unicode uses the same point to encode Russian and OCS letters, but OCS variant looked like the attached image). This is contrary to our decision to write шт in our OCS lemmas, which I understood (apparently mistakenly) had basis in manuscript evidence. I do not know how the reflex of *šč was spelled.
 * Also this letter is not a combination of ш and т but taken from Glagolitic Ⱋ, so maybe some scribes did use it to represent /c/ or /t͡ɕ/ rather than undoubtably Bulgarian /ʃt/ (However, Czech recension writes ц instead of using it).
 * However, and I feel this is the most important aspect for us as lexicographers, languages that have a Church Slavonic tradition (Serbian, and more visibly Russian) unequivocally have a layer of Old Bulgarian loan words, so we have opština/općina in Serbo-Croatian and город/град in Russian (also -ающий since you mentioned verbal morphology). If we made made OCS their ancestor this would obscure an important point, that Bulgarian elements were imported with the liturgical language. Crom daba (talk) 21:00, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, there was even a Glagolitic Ⰼ|letter for *ď, but 1) *ť could also be written ⱎⱅ št in two letters, 2) *sť could also be written Ⱋ… The chaos.
 * After thinking a bit, I’m not entirely sure what is better. The language origins are definitely in the Eastern South Slavic lands, that’s where most of the translations were made and that’s where it spread from. Also normalised OCS forms given in Wiktionary follow Bulgarian practice, so they have жд etc. Guldrelokk (talk) 01:05, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It depends on what you mean by Old Church Slavonic. In the widely accepted understanding going back to Leskien, OCS is the ancestor of Bulgarian, being the language of a few oldest manuscripts mainly from the Bulgarian-Macedonian area, with other monuments rejected as they differentiated from the Bulgarian variant. Even in its home area the language functioned as a written koine, being subject to regional variation, scribe mistakes owing to differences from their vernacular, hypercorrection and such. However, the very same thing can be said about Old East Slavic; nobody seems to question its ancestry to the modern East Slavic dialects. Among the unique traits OCS shares with some of the modern Bulgarian-Macedonian dialects (and with no other) are the development of *ť and *ď, lack of iotation before *a- and the development of tense yers (they hadn’t yet merged with anything in OCS, but the spelling is indicative). The verbal system is a preservation, but mind that in Old East Slavic, for example, the aorist and imperfect had been probably already lost by that time (birch bark letters do not show any signs of them expect some with a heavy OCS influence). It’s already been pointed out that OCS <лъ> and <ръ> represented syllabic sonorants – this is a universally accepted wisdom, and they were actually written as <ъл> and <ър> as well, because scribes felt no difference. I am not aware of a single feature that would prevent you from deriving the modern Bulgarian term from the OCS one, while this is not possible for any other Slavic language. Guldrelokk (talk) 08:48, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Also, references seem to treat (or explicitly identify) (Old) Church Slavonic and Old Bulgarian as synonyms. Horace Gray Lunt's Old Church Slavonic Grammar speaks of the language "known as Church Slavonic. Since the majority of the early manuscripts which have survived were copied in the Bulgaro-Macedonian area and since there are certain specifically eastern Balkan Slavic features, many scholars have preferred to call the language Old Bulgarian, although Old Macedonian could also be justified." - -sche (discuss) 17:10, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm pinging too. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 21:16, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I don’t have all that much to contribute that hasn’t already been said, but a few points:
 * OCS was basically the standard literary register of Late Common Slavic (starting about a century later than the Proto-Slavic forms we reconstruct), standardized on the basis of a South Slavic dialect. It seems inconsistent to me that we treat Proto-Romance as unified with Classical Latin, yet treat Proto-Slavic as disunified from OCS, but I suppose it’s a consequence of how these lects have historically been treated in scholarship.
 * Different authors have different opinions on which texts are admissible as part of the OCS corpus, and which should be excluded. These differences of corpus can result in differences in how one views OCS.
 * Some of the developments of OCS that it shares with Bulgarian/Macedonian are not universal in OCS writings, and evidence suggests they may not have been present in the oldest OCS:
 * It seems the original Glagolitic alphabet had the letters ⰼ and ⱋ to represent *ď and *ť (rather than ⱋ for št). This was already argued in Durnovo 1931 and Trubeckoj 1954; Lunt also notes that ‘the pronunciation probably varied from region to region’. The Kiev Missal, universally included in the OCS corpus, has z and c as the reflexes of *ď and *ť intead of žd and št.
 * Word-initial iotation was non-phonemic except before u and ǫ (Cyrillic initial ꙗ- generally represents early OCS (j)ě-, and initial а- represents (j)a-, cf. the Glagolitic writings ⱑ- and ⰰ-, with a few exceptions) and often varied.
 * The original Glagolitic alphabet also seems to have had only one yer (suggested by the acrostic of Constantine of Preslav, among other considerations); if this was indeed the case, whether this merger was purely orthographic is impossible to tell.
 * Thus, if we take the language as standardized by Cyril and Methodius as our model for OCS, it could possibly be considered ancestral to all South Slavic languages as far as phonology is concerned; but most surviving OCS manuscripts, coming from a century or two later, show distinctly Bulgarian phonological developments. (Yet others, like the Kiev Missal, show distinctly non-Bulgarian developments.)
 * Setting aside phonology, the lexis of OCS includes many learned words that may never have had currency in the spoken language, coined or borrowed to facilitate translation from Greek.
 * Overall, I vaguely lean toward considering OCS ancestral to Bulgarian, due to shared phonological history, but there are certainly many complications at play. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 04:03, 11 April 2018 (UTC)


 * : Re: It seems inconsistent to me that we treat Proto-Romance as unified with Classical Latin, yet treat Proto-Slavic as disunified from OCS - It's because most languages already formed by the time OCS came about. For example, Old East Slavic (especially its Eastern part) and early Russian were heavily influenced by OCS and they have many parallel forms but neither Old East Slavic or Russian are derived from OCS. See Appendix:Russian doublets, for example. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 05:53, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course, a handful of phonological splits already took place by the time of OCS, but going by the criteria of mutual intelligibility one wouldn’t call the resulting lects separate languages (yet). I agree, Old East Slavic and Old Church Slavonic are not derived from each other, but at least in their early stages (before c. 1000 AD, say) they function rather as two linguistic registers based on two dialects of a single Abstand language (Late Common Slavic). I definitely think the distinction is useful to make, though, and I’m not suggesting we unify Proto-Slavic, OES, and OCS; if anything, I’d be more inclined to disunify the other pair. Anyway, sorry for bringing this up; I didn’t mean to distract away from the discussion at hand. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 06:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Also Български етимологичен речник by Вл. И. Георгиев treats OCS as an ancestor of Bulgarian. Guldrelokk (talk) 16:19, 11 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Another update, I've done some reading of Codex Zographensis and Codex Marianus, Glagolitic manuscripts belonging to the Macedonian recension. It turns out that Zographensis doesn't use but exclusively, and Marianus uses them interchangeably, even in same words, and without regard for  vs.  (a merger which modern Macedonian, unlike modern Bulgarian,  doesn't have as I've mentioned).
 * Also, according to Wikipedia article on Glagolitic, Schenker apparently thinks that št is a ligature of š and t after all. Crom daba (talk) 23:58, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
 * LinguisticdivideinMacedonian1.png Although the situation appears to be somewhat more complicated yet looking at this map... Crom daba (talk) 00:07, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep in mind that people move. The ancestor dialects of a modern dialect are not necessarily located on the same territory. --WikiTiki89 19:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Washington, D.C.
Yeah, I understand it was named after George Washington, but why is it comma and then District of Columbia? That suggests that Washington is a name of a city inside of the District of Columbia, which is not the case, as both names are the same entity. PseudoSkull (talk) 20:22, 10 July 2017 (UTC) EDIT: I think we should explain why that is somewhere in this entry. I used to, as a child, mistakenly think that Washington was a city inside of DC, and I feel others may have the same misperception. PseudoSkull (talk) 20:27, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Is it not more like "Elizabeth, the queen of England" then? —CodeCat 20:23, 10 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Washington is (or was, historically) a municipality inside the District; at the time Washington was founded, there were two other municipalities in the District, Georgetown and Alexandria. In 1871, Congress repealed the individual charters of Georgetown and Washington, and vested the power of government of them into a unitary territorial government for the whole District of Columbia. - -sche (discuss) 21:44, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The original northern boundary of the municipality of Washington within the District of Columbia was Florida Ave.
 * There is a gravestone in an Alexandria, VA cemetery that reads Alexandria, DC. Neelthakrebew (talk) 18:25, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Proto-Slavic word for "east".
I've been trying to find this one and it doesn't seem to exist on Wiktionary. Its descendants are quite diverse, with some having different forms of the same word. All I know is that the Polish word might be derived from a word meaning "to rise". I tried finding that word to no avail. A bit of help, if you may? 71.1.97.49 23:47, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I found the etymology for Russian, but it's from Old Church Slavonic and was calqued from Greek. Polish is a calque of Latin . Both of these etymologies came from Vasmer. (He doesn't give any further morphological analysis of them.) These seem to be unrelated, so perhaps there is a third word that is actually from Proto-Slavic, or no word for "east" in Proto-Slavic at all. — Eru·tuon 03:32, 12 July 2017 (UTC)


 * As suggested above, many Slavic words look like "coinages" as opposed to tracing to a single, common origin (without knowing any Polish I can instantly conjecture that their word means "ascension" or "up-going" because means "up-going" in Russian)


 * I checked my Latvian etym source for  and it lists Old Church Slavonic za ustra among cognates meaning "early in the morning," my conjecture -- the ustra element resembles Russian, perhaps a "morning" sense could have displaced an "east" sense. In summary, if they are more recent coinages modern Slav. words for "east" won't trace to a single parent, words similar to "morning" may have been the "original" word for east (perhaps?) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:35, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * And here it is: . Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:35, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

朝
The current page for 朝 says that the right-side 月 is a graphical corruption of. But other sources say that the 月 existed as 月 in the oracle bone script, which became 水 (some say 川, some say 中間有三點的水流之形) in the bronze script, which became 舟 in the seal script (some say small seal script), and was finally restored to the oracle-bone-script 月 in the regular script after 隸變.

“rice”: 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, etc.
Two questions:
 * 1) What are the origins of the nasal infix -n- in Iranian and Dravidian? From the same source, or a coincidence?
 * 2) Are all of these (incl. other Indo-European descendants, e.g. 🇨🇬) ultimately related to 🇨🇬 > 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬 > 🇨🇬?

Wyang (talk) 01:52, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The Middle Persian word is ultimately from the Proto-Dravidian word (or from the same source as the Proto-Dravidian word). Is it possible that although (some of?) the attested intermediaries lack the nasal, alternative forms existed which preserved the nasal of the Proto-Dravidian word (or of its source) and that Persian borrowed those forms?
 * Van Driem, citing Osada (1995) and Diffloth (2005) for the reconstruction, thinks Proto-Austro-Asiatic *rǝŋkoːʔ "rice grain" is the source of the Proto-Dravidian and Middle Persian words.
 * He also mentions that the Proto-Hmong-Mien word for "rice grain" was *n̥jeŋ (and mentions that this term may have been borrowed from, or loaned into, Old Chinese 饟 and/or 囊), but without reading further I'm not sure if he's suggesting that *rǝŋkoːʔ and *n̥jeŋ are connected or not.
 * - -sche (discuss) 16:31, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

cat
In our entry for ‘cat’, the ultimate origin is currently given thus: But none of these words are even plausibly Egyptian, Late or ‘earlier’; Egyptian was not written with vowels, and the word for female cat would necessarily have a feminine suffix. As far as words for cats go, the fairly comprehensive Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae has only, , and.
 * Jean-Paul Savignac suggests it is from Late 🇨🇬, feminine of, from earlier.

What seems to have happened to yield ‘’ is that Savignac took a Coptic word and slapped a feminine article  on the front, but I have no idea where ‘’ or ‘’ come from. Anyone else able to unravel what Savignac meant? Should I just remove it from the entry? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 13:46, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I looked into various references on this when I edited the etymology a bit [//en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=cat&type=revision&diff=43019465&oldid=43018145 in May]. As I understand it, the general view is that it comes from Afro-Asiatic, but each proposed etymon has problems. Without outright dropping any of the current content/theories, one might say:
 * [...] from (used around 75 AD by Martial), which is generally though to be from an  language, although each specific proposed etymon has presented problems. Many references refer to "Berber " and "Nubian " as etyma or cognates, but ["Berber" refers to an entire family of languages and it is not clear which one is meant, and] M. Lionel Bender opines that the Nubian term is a loan from Arabic. Jean-Paul Savignac suggests it is from a Late Egyptian term *čaute, feminine of *čaus ("jungle cat, African wildcat"), from a word *tešau ("female cat"), but such words are unattested and morphologically problematic.
 * is a good name. A search for yields the code   for Saraveca and the code   for the . The  currently don't have a code either. Ideally the code for Proto-Sara should be related to the code for the Sara languages. Pinging, who does a lot with language codes. — Eru·tuon 19:16, 27 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the pings. :) (When I first started editing, the person who understood the language code system best was Liliana; I learned from them and tried to document how it worked, and I'm glad there are now several users who understand how to formulate and add codes, even if I seem to be the go-to expert, heh.) As mentioned above, we'll need to add a family code and then a proto-language code based on it. As documented in WT:Families, the family code should start with the nearest ISO code: the Sara languages are Central Sudanic languages,, so I've added the code   for the family of Sara languages, and   for Proto-Sara. - -sche (discuss) 23:19, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

etymology of Hungarian words ending in -áció, -ikus, etc
Many Hungarian words with suffixes have etymology sections written in a way that I think is somehow incorrect and I wanted to ask more experienced contributors if they think they should be edited. I am showing below an example, taken from word :

From, from , from.

which implies that the French word has an Hungarian suffix, while it's actually the original Hungarian lemma that has an Hungarian suffix. Do you agree with me that they should be edited maybe in the following way:

From, from , from. With  ending.

I am not sure this is correct though, in particular if the suffix template should be used here. And also if just

Equivalent to with  ending.

should rather be used. For more examples see -ikus Epantaleo (talk) 23:09, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
 * --Victar (talk) 21:53, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

PIE

 * I've seen some roots with what appear to be suffixes, like  from . Are these extensions on reanalysed roots from the stative, ex.  >  >  > ? --Victar (talk) 22:27, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Are there any sources on it? —CodeCat 16:02, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * That's what I'm asking. I'm trying to understand the above transition. --Victar (talk) 20:14, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Which sources say that there is a transition? —CodeCat 20:15, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Mallory/Adams cites *skeh₁i(-d)- as from *sek- ‘cut’ on pages 373-374, and 510, for example. We also have from  (p. 401),  from  (p. 482). Mallory/Adams actually goes on to call *-eh₁- a deadjectival verb suffix on page 57., any thoughts as well? --Victar (talk) 21:09, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Reanalysed roots
Thanks. --Victar (talk) 15:58, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I had a couple of questions on reanalysed roots:
 * 1) Are reanalysed roots actually based on a form that existed and was in use, or were they simply extensions, and intentionally added to roots to create new roots? And if that last statement is wrong, please correct me.
 * 2) Should we place reanalysed roots in the extensions section on entries, with extensions like *-dʰh₁-, which don't modify the root as reanalysed roots do? Or do these belong in the Derived terms? See Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/kes-.
 * Roots never existed as such, because they weren't words anymore than is. I think that speakers would have treated any single-syllable stem as a root, though they must have understood that the thematic vowel was not part of the root. If a root was nonsyllabic while some verbal suffix had an e-grade alternating with zero grade, then that looked to speakers very much like a plain root verb, and reanalysis was possible. The next step would have been for speakers to create new formations derived from such roots, using derivations that were normally restricted to being directly from roots. Examples are the  and  nouns, the  adjective, and characterised verbs such as nasal-infix presents or causatives. —CodeCat 14:02, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I think maybe I wasn't clear, or maybe I'm not following your reply. So, for example, the reanalyzed root of the *éy-present suffix above, . Are we sure that an actual *tḱéyti verb ever existed and was in use, or did people just use *éy as a extension on the basis of the existing -éyti verb suffix, along with noun suffixes like from *kés-u-s ~ *ks-éw-s? --Victar (talk) 18:09, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * That's one reason why I find the explanations given by sources a bit ad-hoc. There aren't really many instances of the intermediate verb existing directly. At the same time, though, if these kinds of formations were falling out of use, that would be a big reason for the reanalysis happening in the first place. If the formations remained transparent and productive to speakers, they wouldn't have been motivated to reanalyse them as roots. So I think we're digging into the earlier history of PIE here, looking at formations that were moribund in late PIE already. —CodeCat 18:21, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Right. I suppose a prime example would be r/n-stems which became unproductive very early in PIE, requiring speakers to tack more productive suffixes onto them.
 * So to my second question though, should these reanalysed roots be in the extensions section or in the descendants list, as I've done on Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/kes-? --Victar (talk) 19:07, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I think the "extensions" section is a cop-out. It's basically saying "there's just some random element stuck on the end of the root, but we don't understand it". I think it's bad linguistics to say that two terms are related, without also saying how they are related. —CodeCat 19:11, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Hah, OK. Glad I asked. *Victar is now off to better understand "dʰh₁-extentions"* --Victar (talk) 19:19, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Slander
Have just been listening to an lecture by a Msr. Sagot who immediately corrected a slanderous comment by a lady present that most of the etymologies on Wiktionary were from old fashioned sources, that is certainly not true, as I can confirm that many are updated. In any case, most of the hard back dictionaries of the last century present safer etymologies than some of the recent more scientific ones which wander into wild connections and false assumptions, such that even intelligent visitors to the site would negate! I feel that this should come to the notice of this organisation, in case of potential infamy. Andrew H. Gray 17:54, 28 November 2017 (UTC)Andrew (talk)