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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Hmm, I hadn't expected to be so fruitful. Some interesting, if unsupported, speculations have come out. Can anyone support them with evidence, if that's not too crass a question? See at the end what I mean by "evidence".)
Dealing with Dan's extended replies:
| What's wrong with exploring random directions to see what turns up? |
Nowt, lad. I think I meant "unwarranted directions", i.e., directions taken because a signpost was provably misread by the person who followed it. But then, navigating by maps rather than satnav as we do, my wife and I have turned up in some interesting random places occasionally. More usually, though, just the wrong place ...
| A branch of Orthodoxy like to call itself skeptical, but they're really just reactionaries. |
I prefer "sceptical", meself. In my experience (particularly in the UFO and psychic phenomena fields), most "sceptics" are believers, just in something different. I guess I'm rather in that category. Different belief systems. Can something useful come from the meeting?
| Where Troy Once Stood: which was in East Anglia |
Ah yes, I read it years ago (library book) in New Zealand. Wasn't impressed--too many loose connections. Must read his "Trojan Kings ...", which I downloaded some time ago.
| I was saying wagon/wake and flow/plough hang together in a conceptual lump ... You didn't see it that way ..., so we should just let it ride until something comes along to tip the balance. |
Fair enough, for the present.
| Korax/coracoid is to do with ravens/crows: perhaps the beak is likened to the claw |
I'm perfectly happy for it to be from the noise that almost all northern hemisphere make, which we habitually mis-spell as "caw!" (Mis-spell because I'm sure that's not how crows'd spell it.) Dunno what you'll think of this, BTW, but raven "comes from" (is related to) OE hrafn, where the h- is supposed to represent the [x] sound in "loch"--i.e., another representation of the birds' vocal sounds. (Single f pretty regularly appears where modern English has "v", e.g., seofon = "seven". Note the lack of an arrow ...)
With regard to the rest--I'm still not happy about connecting words initially on the basis of "similar" spellings (have we established that spelling doesn't equate to pronunciation?) and "similar" meanings. The word for "dog" in one of the Australian Aborigine language is transliterated as dog, but it's probably just coincidence; it's gudaga in related dialects. Loss of an unstressed initial syllable, as compared with those related dialects, is a regular feature of the language. E.g., in the same dialect, li, "we two", equates to ngali in related dialects. The change of /a/ to /o/, as compared with related dialects, is also regular, apparently (according to several sources I've read on-line).
It's easy to be led astray by coincidences if you're looking for meaning, which is what the human brain seems constructed to do. Speculation is all very well, but needs to be checked against other information. Keep going, but (I'm sure you don't need this from me) it may all come to naught (or nowt). It's the lack of historical support for coincidental similarities (or the demonstration of a more likely, evidence-based, explanation) that puts such connections out of court for "the authorities".
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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So Don, when you wrote...
| An after-thought: Why is "plough" recorded so late in English (or any other language, 'sfaras I know) as a name for Ursa Major? Could be because earlier ploughs looked nothing like the constellation, whereas wagons did and do. |
... you had actually done what you accuse us of doing -- not checking the evidence.
As I have demonstrated the seven stars of that particular asterism look pretty much like any design of ancient plough you could come across (there is no fixed sequence for joining up the dots) but it can only be made to represent a wagon after the wheels have fallen off.
The whole point of the Amaxa... axe... shoulder... plough, exercise, was to show (on a very small scale) how we develop ideas... evidence doesn't come into it (not yet anyway) and if it comes to nowt (as most ideas do) no worries (we're simply thinking out loud)... we move on to the next one.
But every now and then...
| Hmm, I hadn't expected to be so fruitful. |
You will in future... if you stick around.
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Don, I hope you stick around....However....
When you ride into Deadwood...you don't yell out "there is no gold in these hills"...you will be driven out of town...
When you ride into Deadwood...you don't yell out "gold" as N8 will personally hit you over the head with his shovel, and steal your claim..
N8 knows this as he spends most of his time at Miss Lulu's getting drunk, ravishing the whores and watching the strangers arrive.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| nemesis8 wrote: | | N8 knows this as he spends most of his time at Miss Lulu's getting drunk, ravishing the whores and watching the strangers arrive. |
Message from Lulu:
Get your arse (and that ***kin' shovel) out of here, or she'll feed you to the pigs.
She ain't running no charity.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Continuing:
| "I reckon that wain, wagon, way, wake... are all the same word" |
So are "pleroma" and "plerome", but equating one word with another doesn't provide a definition of either of them. Are you saying that a "wake" is a type of wagon?
Similarly for "plough":
| plow, plowland (a measure of land) |
... from etymonline is the only "definition" I can see. Defining "plough" as "plow" doesn't help. (But I may have missed something else you wrote.)
I dunno if it's interesting or not, but it seems plough is only recorded in OE (as plug, plog) post-Norman Conquest, and its earliest recorded meaning in English is "what a yoke of oxen could plough in a day, a plough land". The meaning "plough" came a little later, replacing the OE for "plough": the noun was sulh, with the verb being erian, to "ear" (not the one on the head).
| How can we tell that German, Dutch and Lithuanian are not "led astray" by the spelling |
Of course, we can't. But it's a balance of probabilities. (a) Why do they (and OE, and sort-of modern English) all put the g there in the first place, if no-one ever pronounced it? Noah Webster decided it was unnecessary when he invented "plow" (along with "nite"). (b) Why do they all except English pronounce the g? It seems to me more probable that English used to say it but doesn't (as many modern speakers say, for example "bu'" for "but"), than that those other languages all acquired it. Wickham's Electroshave, or whatever it was someone else said.
| Are you saying that despite the P = F rule, plough is ruled out as a cognate of flow because it doesn't start with F? |
Not quite, but that plough "is [almost] ruled out as a cognate of" Latin pluere (or plovere, for which the Germanic cognate already exists as flow and similar /f-/ words in other Germanic languages.
The "rule" is less arbitrary than you seem to think (though you may already know this, in which case forgive me): it's uni-directional. A small acquaintance with Latin shows a number of words that begin with /p-/ in Latin, where the "same" word begins with /f-/ in English: pes and "foot", or piscis and "fish", or pecus (as in "pecuniary") and "fee". But not the other way. (Latin f- words often appear as English b- words, but not as p- words.)
So, if "plough" came into English by the same route as "flow" (i.e., if "plough" and pluere/plovere are descended from a common ancestral form), it should be *flough, not "plough".
| how long was it called 'of countrymen the plough,' before that was recorded in 1593? |
Again, we can't tell. We can only go on the evidence we have, that it was called "the Wain", later "Charles' Wain", in OE and in "Middle English", but nobody recorded it as "the Plough" until modern English times. Again, Ickham's Laser.
Incidentally, I came across a reference to it (the constellation) as "David's Wain". It appears in Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, but also in something called Storia do Mogor; or, Mogul India 1653-1708. The Biblical Hebrew name for the body of Ursa Major is, I think (indicating that I'm not checking a reference here, "the Bier".
| Re plovus/plovum: Livy says it comes from the Rhaetians, a people he says were of Etruscan origin. If true, the resemblance to 'plow' is coincidental. |
Why? |
Coulda sworn I wrote "probably coincidental". Thing is, I don't think anyone knows the Etruscan for "rain". But all attempts to show that Etruscan has an Indo-European basis that I know of have failed (odd chance resemblances, with no regular patterns of correspondence), so it's much more likely that Etruscan "rain" is nothing like Latin plovum, "plough", than that they are similar. However, it's unproven either way, and "we need more data".
Finally,
| In what way is this any kind of explanation? |
You wanted to know how the She-Bear got a long tail. It stretched. When "Jupiter" (Zeus) grabbed it and pulled her up into the sky by it.
So the ancient Greeks said, and they were much nearer to when it happened than we are, so they obviously knew more about it. Sounds like a pretty scientific explanation to me.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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What nonsense.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Smile when you say that, podner ...
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Donnie wrote: | | Incidentally, I came across a reference to it (the constellation) as "David's Wain". |
That's it Don... I'm afraid you've completely lost me now... which constellation are you talking about?
You are obviously not talking about The Plough or Charlie's Wain... that's merely an asterism.
Or are you applying some unusual definition of the word constellation, that I'm unfamiliar with?
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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By the way etymology is just a word association game... anybody can play.
Sticking it in a book (or on the net) doesn't make it gospel... and it certainly can't be used as incontrovertible evidence of bugger all.
{Forgive me if I inadvertently slipped a double negative in there... I'm sure you get my drift (or perhaps I shouldn't make such assumptions).}
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Darn. Missed one of Dan's (before I engage with anyone else's).
| Not recorded in English before 1540s |
Surprisingly late. What were wakes called before that |
Well, you know, I haven't been able to find out. Admittedly my OE and ME libraries are somewhat shrunken (basically, I've only got the Interweb thingy nowadays, everything else being back home), but there's a fair amount there, including several dictionaries, and none of them has "wake" in the sense we want.
This could be because the "original English", the OE-ers, and their pre-modern successors didn't see the need for the word. I've looked through the "nautical" bits of Widsith, The Seafarer, Beowulf (don't throw things at me), and Genesis. amd I can't see any particular need for the term to crop up--though if it did, it would quite likely be as a "kenning", a poetic metaphor like "whale-road" for "sea", which doesn't tell you what the usual word was.
Latin similarly lacked a word specifically meaning "wake". I suspect that the OE-ers probably used furh, furuh, "furrow", if ever they needed a term, because (and you're going to enjoy this) the Latin word used for "wake" is sulcus, "furrow"--just as in modern English, we say, "the ship ploughed a furrow through the waves".
Why will you enjoy it? You've probably spotted it already: if Indo-European cognates mean anything, then sulcus is cognate with OE sulh, "plough". "Furrow", meanwhile, "is cognate with" Latin porcus [F ~ P], "the ridge between two furrows".
Oh the deep intertwingledness of it all! I hope that gives yet more for your fertile (well-ploughed?) brain to play with!
BTW, Dan--any advance with the GVS?
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Got me, Chad -- I meant "asterism", of course.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| sulcus is cognate with OE sulh, "plough". |
Sulh sounds like soil. It may, or may not, be significant that the Romans are s'posed to have named Aquae Sulis aka Bath in honour of the 'Celtic goddess Sul'. The A4 "furrow" (i.e. not a ridgeway) connects Bath whose patron saint is St Catherine, the 'sheela-na-gig of Megalithia, to St Paul's whose pre-Christian Christian name was Saul, via Silbury Hill.
| "Furrow", meanwhile, "is cognate with" Latin porcus [F ~ P], "the ridge between two furrows". |
This doesn't make sense at all, the ridge being distinct by definition from the furrow.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Donmillion wrote: | | Got me, Chad -- I meant "asterism", of course. |
Point being... you were perfectly well understood, despite your technically incorrect use of the word "constellation".
In any case "aster" and "stella" are cognate, whichever definition (of the word cognate) you apply (your's, Mick's or Ishmael's).
{And they are both "tsar" words. (A much deeper level of cognateness)}
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| sulcus is cognate with OE sulh, "plough". |
Sulh sounds like soil |
Hattie (Oh Thou of the Bee),. you would have been wonderful at the "Tennis Elbow Foot Game" (of which, tragically, the BBC recording archives have not a single copy!).
Sulh sounds like "soil" if you ignore that inconvenient -h at the end. In the case of Anglo-Saxon furh, the equivalent English word is "furrow", so we should look for an English word like "sullow" (where "-ow" is obviously the equivalent of AS -h).
And sure enough, it exists, though only in dialect nowadays (if at all, nowadays), with the same meaning as in AS, "plough"--which, I think we are agreed is probably a loan-word into AS and English, suddenly appearing in AS shortly after the Norman Conquest with a slightly different meaning from what it means now.
"Soil" is also believed to be a loan-word from those pesky Normans, since it first appears on this side of The Sleeve round about 1300 (etymonline) with the same meaning as the Norman French word, "a piece of land". Not until 150 years later do we find writers using it in the modern sense.
This doesn't negate your connection; the Normans must have got the word from somewhere; why not from Latin sulcus, or even English sullow? (The normal derivation connects it to Latin solium, a "seat", used in the sense of "country seat", and with Latin solum, "ground".)
(Of course, it's possible to reverse the normal meaning of argumentum ex silentio, and argue that "plough" and "soil" were in English all along, and only emerged as English became a written language.)
With regard to:
| "Furrow", meanwhile, "is cognate with" Latin porcus [F ~ P], "the ridge between two furrows". |
This doesn't make sense at all, the ridge being distinct by definition from the furrow. |
Language histories are full of such strange reversals of meaning. Here's one from New Zealand: in England "to take a spell" at an activity is to undertake the activity for a period, so someone else can rest a while; in NZ, it means to rest a while, while someone else does the activity.
Final comment:
Latin sulcus, "plough", is related (by linguists) to sulco, "I plough", and Greek helko, "I pull". If you want to connect "pull" to "plough", be my guest.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Donmillion wrote: | | Language histories are full of such strange reversals of meaning. Here's one from New Zealad: in England "to take a spell" at an activity is to undertake the activity for a period, so someone else can rest a while; in NZ, it means to rest a while, while someone else does the activity. |
Bollocks.
In both instances "spell" means period... It's what is NOT said (but taken as read) that accounts for the difference.
| Latin sulcus, "plough", is related (by linguists) to sulco, "I plough", and Greek helko, "I pull". If you want to connect "pull" to "plough", be my guest. |
WOW... wonder why nobody else ever picked up on that one!
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