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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | I thought they'd say Latin pinus referred to pins/needles... or pinnate feathers... but they say it means "fat, sap, pitch"... all of which make as much sense as fire. Can we tell the order in which these associations arose[? |
Exactly.
Pin might have been derived from Pine, which was cognate with Pyre and Fir, and from which was derived Fire.
Could have happened.
The association occurred to me because Pine and Fir appear to relate via a word like Pyre. And from my knowledge of burning the tree, I know its needles are like natural kindling.
Can we rebuild etymological trees? Not without new rules as the ones currently in use are clearly causing problems for the professionals. I wonder if it is possible to derive a rule from an association such as we have here, apply it universally and see what happens in terms of sorting out chronology.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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On the St. Ives thread Wireloop wrote: Therefore words like 'seuen' may have actually, originally been pronounced as 'SEH-OWN'...TSI-OWN....SION. The pronounciation of SEVEN was a later, inevitable perversion. ....
In my eyes, though I would not state it absolutely, the context and etymology of Sion is cognate with Seven. Now, Sion I admit could mean 'divide' indirectly in the sense that Seven is cognate with the word Sever. |
The reference to severing ties in with thorn (cutting/dividing) which makes me wonder if there's also a connection with the way nouns in English are often distinguished from verbs by adding -tion.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| with the way nouns in English are often distinguished from verbs by adding -tion. |
We'd have to know a little about -tion nouns first. If they are natural then I can't see how the rule would arise unless English is the root-language and root-languages are more synthetic than evolved ones. This is quite possible and an idea to put behind your ear for later.
But it may be that -tion nouns tend to be educated ones ie rather like the way eighteenth/nineteenth scientists used Latin and Greek to form required new words. In that case it is less mysterious but still worth pursuing.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Hatty wrote: | | The reference to severing ties in with thorn (cutting/dividing) which makes me wonder if there's also a connection with the way nouns in English are often distinguished from verbs by adding -tion. |
Yes.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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In Hebrew the same word קוץ ('quotz') can be used for thorn and spine as in other languages (épine in French, spina in Italian); is it only English (and German) where a specific word for 'thorn' occurs?
| We'd have to know a little about -tion nouns first. If they are natural then I can't see how the rule would arise unless English is the root-language and root-languages are more synthetic than evolved ones. |
We had a discussion a while back on corazón ('cept I can never locate anything when I want to check) and came to the conclusion that the -azón ending was the equivalent of -ation in English.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Hatty wrote: | | In Hebrew the same word קוץ ('quotz') can be used for thorn and spine as in other languages (épine in French, spina in Italian); |
How interesting.
Let's play the backwards game again:
ץוק
And you say it means "pin"?
Fascinating.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Hatty wrote: | | We had a discussion a while back on corazón ('cept I can never locate anything when I want to check) and came to the conclusion that the -azón ending was the equivalent of -ation in English. |
Yes.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Let's play the backwards game again:
ץוק
And you say it means "pin"? |
Hmm. Doesn't half look like 'piy' in reverse.
The Hebrew word צפון ('tzafon') means north. Thor and 'of Thor' (thorn) belong to northern people's culture; Thor's hammer comes back to the thrower. Magnetic north?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| The reference to severing ties in with thorn (cutting/dividing) which makes me wonder if there's also a connection with the way nouns in English are often distinguished from verbs by adding -tion. |
'Course, a scion is an off-shoot "of unknown origin", which is a literal dividing; and making a verb of a noun or vice versa sure seems like an off-shooting kind of thing.
But the, the majority of -tion and -ion words are actually -ation, presumably -ate-ion; (some of) the -ings being what became of (some of) the -ens, perhaps?
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| 'Course, a scion is an off-shoot "of unknown origin", which is a literal dividing; and making a verb of a noun or vice versa sure seems like an off-shooting kind of thing. |
That's interesting, a kinship pattern literally emerges. If Dan's correct, the building of words may be related to how family relationships and the 'branching of the vine' are constructed on the ground as it were. Talking of ground, Thor might be connected to 'tir' meaning land as in tierre.
Scion sounds like 'Sion/Zion' (the Hebrew letter for 's' and 'sh' is the same, I'm not clear why 'sion' shouldn't be pronounced 'shion').
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Wireloop
In: Detroit
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What is this a symbol for?
Well it all depends.
In English it is a symbol for the sound/letter 'y', but in Greek it is a symbol for the sound/letter 'g', AND THE NUMBER 3.
Alpha = 1
Beta = 2
Gamma = 3
etc...
So, yet again we see that 'y', 'g' and '3' are related.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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wireloop wrote: What is this a symbol for?
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I might well ask, what does it look like?
The answer?
One vine grafted onto another.
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| Ishmael wrote: | | Previously, I have linked the alphabetical letters C and D with Phi. |
Fie, Sir!
Thou'st shot thy Bolt wide of the mark, methinks.
Know thou good Ishmael, & bee thou aduertis'd,
That fulle eight Centuryes ere Our Lord
Uppon the Rood with's Blood our sinnes redeem'd,
O'er Tyrrhenian waters did gentle Tuscans
Grecian Letters bear homeward, suiting them
To their natiue Clime, as I shall demonstrate.
Gamma they his Trunke & Limbe sideward set
And equall'd each to each both length & breadth,
Pointing them oblykely, one to Heauen,
One to Earth. And in like manner dealt they
With Delta, hoising her Base stark vpright,
Apex tipp'd forward, pointing along the line:
When lastly Romans with these Signes made free,
A curue suffic'd to make them C & D.
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Mick's proposal concerning loss of thou/thee (first post in this thread) may be right, can't say it's impossible, but here are some other things to consider.
The thorn y is different from Greco-Latin 'y' and is still thorn, a bit twisted, but not a substitute for it. As Dan Crisp points out, thou/thee was or were used for a good while after thorn was completely abandoned before the middle of the 16th C. In the First Folio of Mr S. these words are printed as today, and are abundant. Verbs with subject 'thou' are different from those with 'you', so even a blockhead of an aristocrat would not likely have said 'you hast', 'you goest' even if the new-style thorn blurred some'at the distinction between the two pronouns.
Now although it is supposed that thou is familiar and you is to be used to address strangers and especially persons of higher station as they so quaintly said, in the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights you find servants addressing their masters as thou/thee and brother and sister or husband and wife calling each other you in one scene and thou/thee in another. There might be subtle reasons for all this that I've missed, but it gives the impression that the convention was losing definition, as is the case in Spain today for example. Then after the Civil War I imagine the Puritans wanted to suppress everything that smacked of aristocracy, and imposed the single form definitively. In Restoration drama thou/thee/thy make only token appearances.
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Some briefer notes:
'Th' is used to transliterate Greek theta, which is pronounced like English 'th'. The Romans did the same, although they didn't have the sound, to show that the original letter was different from 't'.
'Yous' and 'you-all' or 'y'all' are simply an attempt to differentiate between singular and the plural 'you', which has got lost. Says I.
'Sun' in Greek is helios, not ilios.
Thor the son of Odin? Where does that come from? Thor is Zeus/Jupiter and Odin is Ares/Mars. Never heard of that relation in the Greek and Latin versions.
The alternation of V and F is because they represent the same sound, voiced in the first case, unvoiced in the second. Same for B and P. Also B transforms to F (Etruscan/Albanian for example) and V (case changes in Irish B to BH = V) and P to F and V because, logically at least, although one can look for something more mysterious if one chooses, they are all formed by similar positioning of lips and tongue.
'Seven' is spelled 'seuen' in older books and mss. because the convention was that capital u and v were represented by V, both v and u at the beginning of a word in lower case were spelled v, and u was used for both elsewhere in the word (see my pseudo-Elizabethan verses a couple of posts back). Any connection with 'Sion' is surely very doubtful.
Spanish -azon is not cognate with English -ation, but rather -ción is cognate with -tion, and can be preceded by various vowels and consonants in Spanish as in English: nación transición función interrupción noción etc.
If you try hard enough you can derive any word in one language from a similar sounding word in another. But to what purpose?
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