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vijayjohn wrote:What would the immediate source be for Indian languages and Chinese, though, if it's a calque into any of those languages? Somehow Latin doesn't strike me as a likely immediate source.
linguoboy wrote:I've long known that the usual Catalan word for "root" is arrel. But it never occurred to me before today to wonder where that comes from and why Catalan doesn't have a reflex of Latin RADICEM like pretty much every other Romance language. As you may have guessed, the answer to one question is the answer to the other.
The expected development of RADICEM is raïu (cf. DICET > diu), and this is what we find in early attestations. However, already by the 13th century, this gets hypercorrected to raïl. Later (15th cent.) the diphthong contracts to rel, which is still found dialectally. In the standard language, however, a misdivision takes place similar to that which yielded English an apron from earlier a napron and la rel [ɫəˈrɛɫ] becomes reanalysed as l'arrel (19th cent.).
Car wrote:Youngfun wrote:"Sea star" is how it's called in Italian and in Chinese too.
As in German.
Tenebrarum wrote:Car wrote:Youngfun wrote:"Sea star" is how it's called in Italian and in Chinese too.
As in German.
Same in Vietnamese. I don't think it's a calque of anything though. It's not like "sea star" is a particularly hard simile to make, given the body shape of those creatures.
linguoboy wrote:Tenebrarum wrote:Same in Vietnamese. I don't think it's a calque of anything though. It's not like "sea star" is a particularly hard simile to make, given the body shape of those creatures.
Except for the fact that stars are not in fact "star-shaped", any more than a heart is "heart-shaped".
linguoboy wrote:Here's another case of a Catalan cognate disguised by hypercorrection.
Both [flag=]ca[/flag] malalt and [flag=]fr[/flag] malade derive from [flag=]la[/flag] MALE HABITU(M) "ill kept". I suspect that, in the French word, /i/ was lost early, leading to the cluster *bd which was simplified to *dd and then /d/. In Catalan, what seems to have happened is that intervocalic /b/ first weakened to *β and then vocalised, giving /au/ (attested in early forms) which was then hypercorrected to /al/. (Cf. DEBITU(M) which yielded [flag=]ca[/flag] deute but [flag=]fr[/flag] dette.)
linguoboy wrote:I would not have guessed that tank in sense of "storage vessel for liquids" was cognate with tank in the sense of "armoured military vehicle", and I certainly wouldn't've expected a South Asian etymon (cf. Guj. ṭāṅkī).
I did know it etymologically came from "[water] tank", but I didn't know it came from Gujarati of all things (or a closely related lect).linguoboy wrote:I would not have guessed that tank in sense of "storage vessel for liquids" was cognate with tank in the sense of "armoured military vehicle", and I certainly wouldn't've expected a South Asian etymon (cf. Guj. ṭāṅkī).
linguoboy wrote:Here's another case of a Catalan cognate disguised by hypercorrection.
Both [flag=]ca[/flag] malalt and [flag=]fr[/flag] malade derive from [flag=]la[/flag] MALE HABITU(M) "ill kept". I suspect that, in the French word, /i/ was lost early, leading to the cluster *bd which was simplified to *dd and then /d/. In Catalan, what seems to have happened is that intervocalic /b/ first weakened to *β and then vocalised, giving /au/ (attested in early forms) which was then hypercorrected to /al/. (Cf. DEBITU(M) which yielded [flag=]ca[/flag] deute but [flag=]fr[/flag] dette.)
Lur wrote:It's malauto/a in Aragonese
Koko wrote:Tsk tsk vijay! You're forgetting [flag=]it[/flag] godire
vijayjohn wrote: plus that isn't even Italian; it's Sardinian. In Italian, it's godere,
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