Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2018/April

autexousious
From modern Greek? DTLHS (talk) 07:33, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Unlikely, especially since it's cited in polytonic. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 13:51, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * More like confusion due to the use of "Greek" to also refer to Ancient Greek (as noted in itself), while on Wiktionary we only define Greek as Modern Greek and Ancient Greek is treated separately. mellohi! (僕の乖離) 21:59, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes. As someone who studied classics, I'm one of the people who tends to contrast Greek with Modern Greek, and once I made some laugh out loud by (unintentionally) saying, "I've never been to Modern Greece." —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 22:05, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Istriot and its place in the Romance family
Is anyone particularly knowledgeable about this obscure and almost extinct language? There are rather few good resources on it that I can find. Even though I've added a lot of words, now that we're doing inherited vs borrowed there are complications. I realize there's no way to know for sure which ones were inherited vs. borrowed from a nearby Romance language like Venetian. There isn't any actual scholarly agreement about where exactly Istriot fits among the Romance families. There seem to be three main possibilities and theories about it:

one, that it is closely related to or even an early offshoot of Venetian (even though there are tons of words that are very close or essentially the same as Venetian, this may be due to loans from it as it was an influential and powerful language in the Adriatic region, and there are some other problems with this though, with the existence of words and features that don't fit into this paradigm);

two, that it is closely related to Friulian/Ladin and is actually a Rhaeto-Romance language, and one strongly influenced arealy by nearby Venetian and a little Dalmatian; there are some aspects of the language that pull it toward Friulian rather than Venetian

three, that it is part of the same sub-family as the now-extinct Dalmatian language (there are a few cases of similar developments between the two, like certain diphthongs I believe, but this seems to be a relatively small set of words; however, it's not impossible that these words may represent the very base core vocabulary for Istriot, whereas most of the rest was loans/influence from other regional Romance languages)

Two of the above families are technically part of the larger Italo-Dalmatian one (though Venetian is occasionally put into Gallo-Romance). It seems like it could just be a mixture or hybrid language of several others. Anyone have any idea what the really basal/core vocab is for this language? Or is there no point in really trying, and we should just use the 'der' template for all of them to be safe? Word dewd544 (talk) 23:12, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

sucker
The second etymology suggested origin from either the trick or from. I added reference to OED, which simply treats this a figurative usage of "one that sucks", and etymonline, which specifies either figurative reference to suckling animals or to fish. I didn't see either of the other etymologies in any of the published dictionaries I looked at, but I only looked at a few. Cnilep (talk) 04:32, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I believe it is derived from a rather old slur that only happened to converge to the current form, but I have nothing to back this up (I frequently ignore these hunches of mine due to the disregard these are met with, thanks a lot). An explanation related to "to suck" could be found in blood sucker, leech. Rhyminreason (talk) 19:05, 2 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Since sources for the speculative etymology seems not to be forthcoming, and since another user has added essentially the same definition under Etymology 1, I am removing Etymology 2. Feel free to reverse my actions if they are deemed hasty. Cnilep (talk) 06:14, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Proto-Sarmato-Alanic
OK, let me try this again. I'd like to have 🇨🇬  renamed to Sarmato-Alanic and have entries use. Alanic and Sarmatian (which has no language code otherwise) occupy a dialect continuum, and neither might be the direct ancestor of 🇨🇬 or 🇨🇬. Alanic would then be made into an etymology-only code,. Alternatively, a new language code could be created,, and   removed all together, but I think the former the better option. --Victar (talk) 20:30, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * There are a couple problems here that I see just from a brief reading of the discussion. You want us to change to a name that is very rarely used instead of a more common one, and also switch to considering it a protolanguage rather than an attested one, despite the fact that it is actually attested (yes, we do that for Proto-Norse, but it is not ideal and is in large part because, as is relevant here, we try to use the most commonly used names where possible). —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 01:19, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply, . 99% of the entries I'll be entering will be reconstructions, and most will be derived from Ossetian, not Alanic or Sarmatian borrowing. I think there is a ton of precedence for using alternative names for codes on wikt, but I'll concede that I can't think of any example of using the language code of a dialect to refer to a whole dialect family. I'm not opposed to using  instead, but I do still think then the   code should be discontinued, because Alanic, Sarmatian and Proto-Ossetic should all be under the same code. --Victar (talk) 04:13, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * To give an example of what I had in mind for formatting descendant trees:

* Sarmato-Alanic
 * Alanic:
 * Sarmatian:
 * Ossetian:
 * --Victar (talk) 04:22, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The proportion that are reconstructions is irrelevant unless it's 100%. When we have mainspace entries, we should avoid assigning them to protolanguages (which are technically hypotheses) wherever possible. We always try to use to the most common, unambiguous name possible, and if you know of any exceptions, we should see if they ought to be fixed. Basically, I think you're conflating the needs of descendant trees and the criteria for determining what ought to be a separate language. Bear in mind that regardless of what codes and names are, you can always structure descendant trees to show distinct dialects or sublects (Crom daba has done this quite fruitfully). —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:48, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * , I think you're missing the point of my need. I want to create reconstructions of Proto-Ossetic and Sarmatian. Sarmatian and Alanic are well established as two separate dialects. --Victar (talk) 04:59, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * And if they're dialects, they shouldn't have separate codes. Remember, you can still give them separate lines and reconstructions, when and where those are supported by scholarly sources, regardless of the situation with codes. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 06:18, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Exactly,, which is why Alanic shouldn't have its own code. --Victar (talk) 07:37, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Then why did your example above have them with two different codes? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 16:22, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I tried to indicate  and   where etymology-only codes by the dash in them, but I guess that wasn't clear (though I did make that point in my opening statement) .  We also have   for Old/Proto-Ossentic, which we could used instead for parent of Alanic/Sarmatian/Ossentic. We currently list it below , and I've always considered it a stage between, yet MultiTree seems to use it as their catch-all. Again though, I'm not opposed to using a new   code. --Victar (talk) 17:34, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * We create etymology-only codes for etymology sections. If there's a language that derives terms from both Alanic and Sarmatian with a meaningful difference between the two, then those codes should exist, but we shouldn't create them just for descendant lists, which can be freely formatted. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 18:39, 5 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Here's a different idea. Alanic and Sarmatian are both barely attested; from my brief reading of the literature, it seems to be unclear whether or not they represent dialects or fully separate speech communities, and whether they represent the ancestor of Ossetian or a close relative (and given the timescales over which they are attested, they cannot be the same thing as a protolanguage, which is a hypothesis of the most recent common ancestor). The resultant action would be to have separate codes for Alanic, Sarmatian, and Proto-Ossetic, with the former two only in mainspace (in original script, e.g. Greek) and the latter only in Reconstruction space (in normalised form). As always, you can format descendant lists however you like. Does that seem like it would make sense? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 18:39, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * No, I don't agree with that solution. Whether they exhibit the same exact timeframe is irrelevant and labeling Sarmatian and Ossetic as Alanic is inaccurate. What my sources are reconstructing is a common ancestor of all three of these dialectal branches. See https://ibb.co/jFEnSH. --Victar (talk) 19:01, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Your response is confusing; I did not suggest labelling Sarmatian and Ossetic as Alanic (in fact, I suggested separating all three), and I was under the impression that Proto-Ossetic is the unattested ancestor of all these languages. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 19:30, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Am I understanding this correctly that it is similar to the problem that he have had/are having with Sanskrit and the Prakrits, namely that there is a dialectal continuum between Sarmatian, Alanic, and the unattested ancestor of Ossetian? —*i̯óh₁n̥C[5] 19:24, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Not exactly. Sarmatian, Alanic and Ossentic are all largely unattested dialects form a single language of the Middle Iranian period. So what I'm suggesting is that we unify them under a single code and name, and have the dialects differentiated only by etymology-only codes. I'm recommending the name Sarmato-Alanic, which is what I mostly see in literature when referring to them as a whole, but if I had to choose to unify them under one name out of the three, it would be Ossetic, being the only one with modern descendents. What code we use, be it a repurposed one, or a new one, doesn't matter to me. --Victar (talk) 20:26, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Would you support the idea of unifying Sarmatian and Alanic under Old Ossetic  (as per MultiTree) with both reconstructed and mainspain entries, and making   an etymology only code? That should resolve your Proto-Norse argumentment. --Victar (talk) 22:37, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I see that the name "Old Ossetic" is broadly attested (when spelt correctly), and many sources seem to equate it with Alanic, but that doesn't mean Sarmatian should necessarily be merged as well. If they are indeed dialects as you claimed, then that would be perfectly fine. WP cites EB for the following: "The languages of the Scytho-Sarmatian inscription may represent dialects of a language family of which Modern Ossetian is a continuation, but does not simply represent the same language at an earlier time." If that is true, then Sarmatian should be kept separate. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:29, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * , there is no code for Sarmatian. If we put Alanic under Old Ossetic as part of a dialectal continuum, Sarmatian, as a dialect thought to be very similar to Alanic, should unequivocally be included. Otherwise it defeats the point. --Victar (talk) 23:49, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I would be in favor of Old Ossetic for the continuum of Alanic and Ossetic and, if it can be demonstrated as true, Sarmatian. In what way can we adjudicate this Sarmatian situation? As mentioned before, I'm getting a little bit frustrated at continuously running across this "continuum problem" (attested languages descending from unattested near neighbors). There's been a fair amount of research saying that the phylogeny of language change tends to be binary in nature, but that depends on how you look at language continua versus dialectally diverse super-languages. I'd be interested to think about the principled use of language continua in our language data (like  or the like), not just the "substrata" we use in the etymology-only language data. The question is in the utility of such a demarcation, but the inherent assumption of our current n-ary (or perhaps my theoretically binary) branching system tends to omit this subtlety of language change because frequently these continua are not protolanguages and exist clearly in the data... I dunno. —*i̯óh₁n̥C[5] 00:07, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Ignoring John's tangent... I know there is no code for Sarmatian. That's immaterial; we can make one if we deem it necessary. You claim that Sarmatian is very similar to Alanic, to the point of being a continuum; I know little about this, but found a scholarly source that claims otherwise. Can you respond to that with actual evidence? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:16, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * "Sarmatian and Alanic represent a dialect continuum" and "it is difficult to draw the line between Sarmatian and Alanic".
 * "Ossetic [...] is the last remnant of the essentially unknown Middle Iranian dialect area that included Sarmatian, and is said to descend from Alanic."
 * "[Ossetic] is the sole surviving descendant of the Northeast Iranian dialects of the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians and medieval Alans".
 * "Deine klare linguistische Scheidung zwischen Sarmatisch und Alanisch aufgrund der Materiallage nicht möglich ist"
 * Even if Alanic and Sarmatian were divergent enough to call separate languages, that distinction isn't apparent in the little material we have, so to reconstruct them separately at this time would be folly. --Victar (talk) 01:20, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that seems like good evidence for merger. I am now satisfied with having "Old Ossetic" as an L2 header with categorising context labels for the dialects. I would like to wait a couple of days just in case anyone raises an objection, so please ping me with a reminder. Also, please clarify if there are any etymology sections that need to distinguish between the dialects; if not, we can dispense with etymology-only codes and simply remove . —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:44, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that seems like good evidence for merger. I am now satisfied with having "Old Ossetic" as an L2 header with categorising context labels for the dialects. I would like to wait a couple of days just in case anyone raises an objection, so please ping me with a reminder. Also, please clarify if there are any etymology sections that need to distinguish between the dialects; if not, we can dispense with etymology-only codes and simply remove . —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:44, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

, if you have a moment, I would appreciate you making these changes. Thanks. --Victar (talk) 03:10, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * , could you please respond to the query in the last sentence of my last comment? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:39, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * , yes, need the etymology-only codes as well, not for the linguist distinction, really, but for the historical one, i.e. the names of Alanic kings. --Victar (talk) 04:44, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * ✅. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 05:33, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Changes look good. Thanks, ! --Victar (talk) 05:35, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Kurd
RFV of the etymology.

This is an essay, not an etymology, and an IP just removed the Sumerian part of it with an edit comment say it wasn't true. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:00, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I've removed that first paragraph which wasn't even about the word. For the rest, ? --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 19:29, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
 * See Asatrian, page 22ff for the scholarly etymology. I am not willing to summarize it here myself. --Vahag (talk) 19:36, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
 * So, the claim is that in 600 CE "kwrt" designated nomads, or other social status, not ethnicity, and that term likely derived from a name of the Kyrtian, a tribe as far as I can tell, not from the Karduch. And beyond that, reconstruction was impossible.
 * Without reading its sources, the reason against a relation of "Kurd" to the Karduchoi would be that the Cyrtii are simply preferred (now I mixed upthe English and Greek designations, like the author did). Whether the designations could have a common origin is illusive, there and, I guess, in the other sources as well. The mentioned source, "Cambridge History of Iran .." (see Asatrian p. 25), holding on to the idea, if that's still the case, is enough reason to ask for caution. There's the general problem, that nomadic nature complicates the search sufficiently.
 * It's not clear, to me, why e.g. "kwrt" from 600 CE (cf. p. 23), if designating nomads, should not at the same time have ethnic connotations; After all, ethnicity is pretty hard to define. While the Iranians might have arrived later, that alone doesn't rule out ancestry of "(Indo European)" descent to the "Kyrtians, as well as the Karduchs" (p. 27). According to footnote 33, the author doesn't actually know what language they spoke, so the apparently different origin of the Proto-Kurdish dialects is fairly irrelevant. And that "the ethnonyms of these two people escape any interpretation on Indo-Europan (Iranian) linguistic grounds" is a fair warning, but hypothetical. On the other hand, if their original language is not known, a common origin can't be ruled out, once more.
 * Overall, a name as Origin is not satisfying, because that name then is still unexplained. What was that about Sumerian clay tablets, as per the first IP edit, which a second IP edit removed? Kurds even sources such a claim, but mentions that the link to the Kurds is not secure. More importantly, I find the link that was removed from our etymology to Sumerian "kur" as Mountain interesting, which we don't actually have there. Rhyminreason (talk) 23:54, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Proto-Germanic, and Gothic
So *ulbanduz is a good morphological match for Gothic ulbandus, but not a single published source seems to even mention this as a possible PGmc form. (Re: sources I've found and used, see the references at as well as Kroonen - who doesn't list any PGmc word for camel, it seems - and Köbler.) I've found the etymology of the Gothic word to be very uncertain and mired with problems (it isn't even claimed by all sources to be an inheritance from Proto-Germanic at all and literally every theory seems rather speculative in some way or another), so to keep the Proto-Germanic entry as it is (it seems so sure of itself! even without sources..!) may be a bit misleading. Should *ulbanduz be kept despite the lack of sources, and if so, should it be edited somehow to reflect its uncertain status? Beyond the Gothic word, I am not competent enough at historical linguistics to judge whether the other descendants listed at *ulbanduz might formally match that reconstruction.

The only PGmc reconstruction I've found is in Lehmann (and Köbler, who refers back to Lehmann), who claims *elpandus (= our *elpanduz, I guess?) as the Proto-Germanic etymon. Regrettably, that reconstruction doesn't really match the Gothic form at all (as others, e.g. Jaan Puhvel, have pointed out; see refs at the got. entry). It seems like *elpanduz could at most explain the West-Germanic forms. Should the entry have a label? especially as we're claiming it derives from Late Latin!

Anyway, this has all been very confusing. What do y'all think? — Mnemosientje (t · c) 21:26, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
 * There’s some additional discussion that might be relevant on pages 13 and 20 in this paper, although I guess it mostly follows Puhvel. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 10:06, 21 April 2018 (UTC)


 * So, what are we doing with ? Is it really PG, or should we have a PWG entry, next to Gothic and Norse entries all borrowed from Latin? --  06:03, 21 March 2020 (UTC)


 * It's a weird term, I really am not sure. Morphologically however *elpanduz definitely doesn't look like the source of the Gothic term to me. Not sure what's happening with Old Norse either (ulfaldi?). *ulbanduz would be the expected etymon if Gothic inherited the term, but it isn't clear to me why it should have inherited it given the meaning. Honestly the whole case just confuses the hell out of me. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 10:51, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Roots meaning bend, "shelter"
I was just reading camp, campus, and Swe. kur and have to ask whether those are related by their roots, and if someone can please fix those, while we are at it. Not to mention that I'd like to know whether those roots could be related to "Kurd". Rhyminreason (talk) 23:57, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Is מאָנאַט a loanword from German?
and anyone else who knows about Yiddish etymologies: looks and feels to me like a loanword from German rather than an inherited term from Old High German; can anyone confirm or deny? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 15:32, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't see any reason to believe that it was borrowed. If it was borrowed, it was borrowed before the time that secular intellectual Yiddish became a thing (I find cites as far back as 1795). --WikiTiki89 16:05, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Are the vowels consistent with its being inherited? I would have expected something like from an inherited term. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 16:11, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Well the first vowel is. In fact it's in Standard German where the first vowel is suspicious for an inherited term. Perhaps the Standard German form was borrowed from a dialect? --WikiTiki89 16:13, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The first vowel is normal in Standard German; OHG ā becomes /oː/ before n in, , , , etc. Since the latter two are and  in Yiddish, I guess the vowel of the first syllable of  is regular too. But what about the second syllable? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 17:23, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks! That explains a lot. I have no idea what happened to the second syllable. It must have been reduced to schwa, but then it inexplicably changed to a? --WikiTiki89 17:41, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, that's evidence for its being a borrowing rather than an inheritance, isn't it? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 19:02, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * No, because it's just as puzzling in Standard German. Other languages also have an inexplicable (or seemingly inexplicable) short a: 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬. --WikiTiki89 19:11, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think there's anything inexplicable about an unstressed long vowel becoming short; that's just the weight-to-stress principle asserting itself. There are other German words with unstressed that do not get reduced to schwa, e.g., but neither of my Yiddish dictionaries lists a cognate of that. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 20:17, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Well it's not just that it becomes short, that I don't have an issue with. It's why it becomes a (i.e. instead of o) that I don't understand. Anyway, would probably have been a good parallel if it only had a Yiddish equivalent. --WikiTiki89 20:53, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I found something on where the a comes from. For each of the words listed there, these are the ones for which I found a Yiddish equivalent:
 * {| class="wikitable"

! 🇨🇬 !! 🇨🇬 !! 🇨🇬 !! Note
 * || ||,  || a in Yiddish
 * , ||  ||,  || not helpful
 * || ||  || e in Yiddish
 * || ||  || a in Yiddish
 * || ||  || not helpful (claimed to be a modern borrowing)
 * }
 * I would say it's inconclusive whether the a could be native Yiddish. One thing I'd like to know is how this word was spelled in its earliest attestations (like 1590 and 1660). --WikiTiki89 19:34, 24 April 2018 (UTC)
 * OK I did some research and I found that in Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller's (d. 1654) Yid. translation of אורחות חיים (Day 4 No. 54 republished 1985 "כמו שהודפס בפראג שנת שפ"ו ובמץ תקכ"ז") it's spelled מאניט. --Sije (talk) 21:43, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * What conclusion can we draw from that? Does this mean that represents /ˈmɔnət/ and is inherited, while  has /a/ in the second syllable under the influence of the German word, perhaps? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 22:08, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Perhaps. (Sorry but I'm not really that great in analyzing etymologies.) --Sije (talk) 22:14, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * }
 * I would say it's inconclusive whether the a could be native Yiddish. One thing I'd like to know is how this word was spelled in its earliest attestations (like 1590 and 1660). --WikiTiki89 19:34, 24 April 2018 (UTC)
 * OK I did some research and I found that in Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller's (d. 1654) Yid. translation of אורחות חיים (Day 4 No. 54 republished 1985 "כמו שהודפס בפראג שנת שפ"ו ובמץ תקכ"ז") it's spelled מאניט. --Sije (talk) 21:43, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * What conclusion can we draw from that? Does this mean that represents /ˈmɔnət/ and is inherited, while  has /a/ in the second syllable under the influence of the German word, perhaps? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 22:08, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Perhaps. (Sorry but I'm not really that great in analyzing etymologies.) --Sije (talk) 22:14, 2 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Yes, represents mōnət  (which would be modern ). As for the story it tells, here are some possibilities:
 * could have evolved from independently of but parallel to the equivalent change in German.
 * could be a Standard-German-influenced spelling of an inherited from.
 * could be a recent borrowing from Standard German after was lost.
 * And in turn, we still have no way of knowing whether represents an inherited form or a borrowing from that time period itself. Either option can combine with any of the above three options. --WikiTiki89 22:22, 2 May 2018 (UTC)


 * I wish were around to help. This word is definitely a borrowing, and by sifting through Google Books, I even find some hypotheses surrounding its borrowing: Wexler's Slavic nonsense, a possible but as far as I know unsupported idea that it was borrowed to distinguish secular months from the Jewish ones, etc. As for the origin of the German word, I can't shed any light on that, but it seems irrelevant to the Yiddish word. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 16:29, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Based on what do you say it's definitely a borrowing? --WikiTiki89 16:46, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The shape of the word is weird, and there is strong scholarly support. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 16:50, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The "shape" of the word is just as weird in Standard German. Can you link to the strong scholarly support? --WikiTiki89 17:41, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Not now. Try looking for yourself. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 17:52, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It's not urgent. I just won't believe it until I see it. (And I did try looking myself and it doesn't seem that anyone says anything conclusive.) Another thing to consider is that there is no clear distinction between so-called "inheritance" and "borrowing" in early Yiddish, and from what I found in the scholarly sources you seem to mention this word is attested as far back as 1590. And then even if it is a borrowing, it would have been from Standard Middle High German or very early Standard Modern German, and before ān merged with ōn (or from a dialect where that didn't happen). --WikiTiki89 18:04, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Is "Monade", monad, Lt. "monas", AGr. relevant at all? See Monad_(Gnosticism); means unit. 178.24.236.90 12:34, 25 April 2018 (UTC)(and because I can't contain myself: The greek is also distantly related to "mahnen" (remind, demand, reprimand, a form of corrective measure). Rhyminreason (talk) 12:36, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's relevant, but who knows. --WikiTiki89 14:15, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * No, it's not relevant. means "alone", and a monad is a single thing. mahnen is unrelated to either, but it's related to mind. The word in question is related to 🇨🇬, though I'm not sure where the "þ" in 🇨🇬 came from (I would guess it's some kind of suffix). To save you the trouble, it's also unrelated to mouth, money, mound, mint, mandrill, mined, mandate, and dozens of words in unrelated languages. I would also add maunder, but it's a good description of what I'm responding to. Why do you constantly feel compelled to redefine well-known words, ignore well-known and widely accepted etymologies, and burden us with having to explain to you in detail why water is wet and pigs don't fly? Chuck Entz (talk) 17:25, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The reason it could in theory be relevant is simply due to the superficial similarity of the words Monade and Monat, the former could hypothetically have influenced the a vowel of the latter. I find it unlikely, but it's not a super crazy theory. --WikiTiki89 18:09, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

precover (etymology 2)
Is this pre- + discover? pre- + recover? Something else? DTLHS (talk) 23:32, 24 April 2018 (UTC)


 * asserts the noun is from both, short for "pre-discovery recovery". - -sche (discuss) 17:44, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

this too shall pass
Requesting verification that this is from Persian. DTLHS (talk) 03:40, 25 April 2018 (UTC)


 * As best I can tell, an English translation of a Persian story containing the adage [is said to have] popularized it, although roughly the same sentiment can be found in English as far back as Old English. At best this would seem to be a calque. - -sche (discuss) 17:48, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Etymology of amaze
The page for claims that it comes from a Middle English verb, in turn from. This all sounds fairly straightforwards at first, but soon encounters difficulties in that there is no attestation AFAIK of any of the forms of other than the past participle  (reasonably common) and the present participle  (pretty rare).

This could be attributed to a lack of evidence, but is pretty common, so one would expect some actual finite forms (e.g. amasest, amased(e), amase, amaseth) to be attested if it actually functioned as a verb in Middle English, or even the infinitive  to appear at some point. Other sources mention a verb amasen, but they seem to extrapolating from the participles as no quotes of these missing forms exist. Any thoughts? --Hazarasp (talk) 13:58, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Middle English is not as well attested compared with other languages of the same era, like middle Dutch. This is because the languages mostly written in England at the time were French and Latin. The forms amased and especially a-masynge are in fact attestations of the verb. Along with the related verbs ME masen, OE āmasian, and ModE amaze it suggests that the ME verb most likely existed, even though it is not recorded in any other forms. We can mark the infinitive with an asterisk, but in doing so we might have to do this with many other ME verbs as well. IMO, I don't see the extrapolation of the verb to be a major problem. Leasnam (talk) 14:17, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Finnish kunta - vandalism?
Or does the editor of this and this have very surprising new knowledge not in and contradicting Häkkinen? --Espoo (talk) 20:44, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Not quite vandalism, but a known problem user who felt compelled to treat every vaguely-similar non-Finnish word as either a cognate or a false cognate of Finnish words. They started out as Liedes, then they got blocked and they switched to IP editing, which we've been blocking. I think we have everything pretty much under control going forward, but they left a lot of edits and not all of them have been checked. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:09, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

mākutu
RFV of the etymology.

This Māori entry was created by a Malaysian IP, apparently solely to link to from the etymology at. It does seem to be a real word (maoridictionary.co.nz has an entry), but the entries in online etymology databases for the Māori term and the Malay term don't seem to be aware of this correspondence (Blust has problems with his theory and methodology, but is pretty thorough). I don't have the sources to properly judge the validity of etymologies such as this, but it seems like a bit of a stretch- and this IP is adding lots of them. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:41, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

áru
RFV of the Old Irish etymology. Seems a priori unlikely, but stranger things have happened. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 15:22, 30 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Matasović seems to consider them cognates. (Also Etymonline, which I know is not inherently reliable in itself but which can provide leads to look into, cites de Vaan for at least some of the possible cognates of 🇨🇬 that it lists, although maybe not for this one; someone would have to check de Vaan and find out.) - -sche (discuss) 15:45, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Matasovic considers it a possibility, but only if has a different etymology from the one we currently give it. I've added his etymology with the source now. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 16:56, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Etymology of Ancient Greek σάκος
According to http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?root=config&morpho=0, the origin of the Ancient Greek σᾰ́κος is the PIE *twak-, hide. Caeruleancentaur (talk) 18:38, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Which of all those databases says that? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 19:13, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Beekes also cites this etymology as traditional, he connects it to Semitic though (I find the original etymology better though). Crom daba (talk) 21:04, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * What's the source for the PIE root *twak- or *twek-? I suppose that both aspects of the current etymology edition could be true, not "alternative". That is, the common root of σᾰ́κος and σάκκος could be old; *twek- (*twak-) could be an intermediate root to σᾰ́κος. Both words, the shield and sack senses, could have converged again because of overlapping meaning. After all, a shield suspended from a spear balanced on the shoulders would be akin to a sack carried the same way.
 * starling is not going to be accepted as a source, but they often cite others. Rhyminreason (talk) 09:51, 2 May 2018 (UTC)