And now for a brief musical interlude while I cook up some new posts on the ongoing project of the Crescentine family of languages and cultures...
I haven't written one of these in awhile, but something just bit me, and I need to. ^_^
To the tune of "Oh l'Amour" by Erasure from 1986 (original lyrics). If you search for it, make sure you find this version, where the chorus has heavier percussion and background vocal harmonies. The first album version is bit slower and not as intense -- which a song about pining-away for lost or unrequited love must be!
* * *
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
Like-baiting you
You were like-baiting me
Always fan-arting you
You wrote it off as just memes
Oh S of my chart,
Don't make me feel own'd
Just scrap me for parts
Like your last-model phone
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
Why close without save?
Why unfollow me?
I just F5 and pray
For at least a subtweet
On ye olde timeline
In my DM's you'd slide:
"Get yours, I'll get mine
But won't be one-guy'd"
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
No recov'rable files
You never bookmarked my page
I'm leaving this site
What's left to engage?
Oh S of my chart
You've chased enough clout
Come click on restart
My system's crashed out
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
Heat wave on forth of July weekend and the all American suburbs are DEAD. I walked and drove around and it was like being on an abandoned space colony. Whereas 30 years ago on a hot humid 4th of July night there would be stoners hanging out in front of strip malls at night, random people driving around yelling at randos and playing music, kids on bikes, eccentric types, there is maybe 5% of that at most. It's a ghost world for America's 250th.
ReplyDeleteIs this song dedicated to anybody in particular? I used to remember when you wrote songs dedicated to Holohive girls and before that dedicated to political Twitter girls.
ReplyDeletePolitical realignment update: A lot of the America First MAGA base has turned on Trump and the Republican Party and are calling them traitors. Tucker Carlson has announced that he has left the Republican Party. Nick Fuentes and Casey Putsch and their groyper supporters are now supporting the Democrat Amy Acton against Trump backed Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio governor election. etc. Getting pretty close to the America First MAGA base switching wholesale to the left.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what elite factions are likely going to defect from the Republican Party yet. I guess it's a question of who in the Republican party coalition is getting screwed over by Trump.
Amy Acton will be the easiest Democrat vote I ever cast. Not just to prevent further Republican control over what used to be a nice purple state, but specifically since they're trying to elevate anti-American foreigner Ramaswamy of all people. Some Indian scammer who crashed out publicly on CHRISTMAS about how you goycattle scum don't studymaxx hard enough and deserve your replacement by strivers who'll work for peanuts.
ReplyDeleteHe was a total nobody, no experience in politics whatsoever, just a scammer from the QE era of free money to flim-flam scum with nepo connections, like his mom. Just a dumbass talking head on Fox News -- now suddenly he's supposed to be the governor of a major American state? Get the fuck outta here...
And a warning to the remaining numbnuts who didn't abandon Trump like I did when he bombed Syria in April 2017, proving what kind of country he wanted really wanted to see --
They are absolutely going to elevate this fat 40-something-looking uggo Zoomer gold-digger Leavitt, the press secretary who on the Fourth of July told everyone but especially men under 40, that they were born with silver spoons in their mouths, just need to gold-dig a disgusting old Boomer like she did (even worse, he's probably a closeted fag, and she's a live-in fag-hag, knowing Republican politicians), otherwise we're sending you to Iran so you can die for Israel, and that'll toughen up your moral fiber.
100% guaranteed -- look what they did with Ramaswamy. After that insane audience-berating crash-out, he should've been fed to the wood-chipper (literally, not politically), and yet the party deliberately chose him over anyone else for what they consider a shoe-in race (governor of a fairly red state). Trump personally lobbied for him -- another reason the orange retard belongs in the wood-chipper (literally, not politically).
If they're doing that with a nobody talking-head, imagine what they're going to do with someone who's much higher-ranking talking head, like a press secretary. She's now way better connected than he ever was.
Also look at another former WH Press Sec under Trump: Season One -- who's now the governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee. Of course her father was the previous one, so that's a lot better of a nepo connection -- but still, she would've been pushed there no matter who her father was, as long as she was favored by the orange retard.
Leavitt is from New Hampshire -- might be a tall order to push her in her home state, they might try pushing her on some cuckservative Southern state instead.
Just remember -- the only way to stop this scum from taking over is to just vote Democrat. Hope for the best Democrat, vote in a Dem primary so you don't get some Boomer Zionist scum, but someone who'll do at least 1 good thing in office -- but most importantly, to begin draining the nation of Reaganite GOP toxic waste sludge.
ReplyDeleteI will happily be voting straight-ticket Democrat from now on. It's not even a question. It won't save the nation, but at least it'll make it more liveable on the way down, and we can punish at least half of the scum responsible for destroying our once wonderful country.
Same thing for 2028 -- first time in my life I'll vote Democrat for prez (only Nader 2000, and Trump 2016 and grudgingly in 2020, then back to Green in 2024). I won't begrudge someone who votes Green in '28, it'll probably be a holocaust on Republicans regardless, but I just want to make extra-sure the retard cult around Trump gets permanently purged from society.
With all the victories the DSA has been wracking up lately, we might actually get a not-too-terrible Dem on the ballot. I don't count on it, and I don't care if it's Biden again as long as he campaigns on exterminating Trump, locking up his family, expropriating their ill-gotten scammer wealth, shutting down Fox News and the political media posting on Twitter, etc.
Someone has to pay for this country being destroyed -- and we're too polarized to have a non-partisan dispassionate purging of the evil scum on all sides, so it'll be one side exterminating the other side. I don't care which side does the exterminating, and which side gets exterminated -- somebody has to pay, and the Republicans have proven for 10 years that they will look the other way, be absentee, abdicate, and even enable the libtard scum, while throwing their own supporters under the bus.
Democrats will defend literally everyone on their own team, even a straight white guy running for Senate who has a Nazi-coded tattoo, they sicc their dogs against Republicans, and although they're less violent than 10 years ago (good), they still haven't dropped the talk about imprisoning Trump and Republicans and punishing their corruption, Epstein links, starting a new war on Iran for Israel, etc etc etc.
No Democrat Press Sec ever told me I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and that I need to bust my ass to compete with work-for-peanuts foreigners, or else I'm going to die for Israel in Iran. I know that's empty blather from impotent Republicans, who can't get the country to comply with any of their bullshit -- but it's a real slap in the face to their own supporters. I'm not as angry about it, since I voted against Trump last time and cannot be "betrayed" by conservatards this time around.
But looking back at how Biden's press team addressed the nation, it wasn't half as disrespectful, hostile, and antagonizing against *their own people*. Yeah, Biden said "our patience is wearing thin" to Republicans who wouldn't get the jab -- but he didn't talk like that to his own voters (99% of whom are uber-vaxxers). He had 2 female Press Sec's, and neither of them pulled the bullshit that Leavitt and Ramaswamy did against their own side.
All empires go through social-cultural auto-immune diseases when they collapse, turning on the self and waving through foreign pathogens. But one party is infinitely worse about this than the other, and it's Republicans -- the originators of "there is no such thing as society" from the triumphalist days of Reaganism. They're too stuck in their ways, so they will ratchet up this auto-immune disease as they collapse -- sacrificing their own side, while waving through the most anti-social scum from the other side.
Republicans have now degenerated into The AIDS Party, in many cases literally, so guess who's getting the votes of Americans who want to purge AIDS from our once-healthy society? Easiest vote of my life.
One of the ultimate "fell for it again" awards in Trump: Season Three, is the incels who bought into the rightoid meme about "state-mandated goth gfs", if they vote Republican... as though Republicans, rather than Democrats, control the supply of goths or any kind of alt girl or baddie or whatever they're imagining...
ReplyDeleteBest we can do is, a 47 year-old-looking Zoomer HR Karen who sold herself to a literal Boomer mummy, berating you for playing video games in mom's basement all day long instead of busting your ass like she did, and that if you don't unplug yourself from your silver-spoon lifestyle of video games and porn, you're going to Iran to die for Israel.
"Heh, you just don't get it -- we're not going to *ask* for goth gf's. No more Mr. Nice Guy -- we're going to CONQUER them as WAR-BRIDES!"
Yeah, just like how you scooped up all those hot Persian baddies by bombing Iran and getting cucked by Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, right? Or all those Venezuelan thicc-booty latinas, after failing to topple Chavismo yet again, right? Write better fan-fic, you wannabe school-shooter girl-hating trash.
Your own party said, "You're not getting hotties or even mids of any background, and even the uggos who we do control are going to be auctioned off to the Boomers"!
Sorry, but if you fell for that one, you really are too stupid to vote, and are the reason that literacy tests should be re-instated for voting rights.
If you really want a goth gf, write her a yearning, pining-away song, which is not self-pitying or mopey or whatever, but makes it seem like she's a prize, someone who isn't *totally* out of your league, but who isn't a shoe-in conquest either. They will actually listen to your audition if you serenade them like that... success not guaranteed, but nothing worth winning is, right?
ReplyDeleteOn that note, no, I didn't have anyone in particular in mind when writing this last one, I just got bit by the bug and had to. Let it inspire or motivate you, to shoot your own shot... in the same way, don't insult them, don't make it about sex, don't act like you're above them. I know it's crazy I have to say that, but Millennials and Zoomers grew up with their brains and souls turned inside-out, so let a Gen X-er guide you toward the true path of pure love...
If you wouldn't see it in a John Hughes movie, or hear it on the soundtrack, just don't do it. If the girl has her soul turned inside-out, and would laugh or show your song to her friends / the internet for laugh-clicks, she wasn't worth it anyway, and just move on.
Not all Millennials, Zoomers, or Alphas are worthless anti-social trash. And truthfully, they respond to how you treat them first. The worse you treat them, the more they lock in to being haters right back atcha. Be the first to break the cycle, and start serenading them about being princess prizes worth winning over. It's your role as the guy to lead the way forward, especially out of a garbage-dump like the 21st century battle of the sexes.
"Bla bla bla, clueless out-of-touch Gen X-er who still thinks America is in the wholesome high-trust 1980s and early '90s, when sincere yearning serenades will be appreciated or even rewarded, rather than turned against them for global public mockery..."
It's not 2015-2020 anymore -- *now* who's out of touch? The social harmony vs. discord cycle has inflected as of several years ago, as shown by the absence of riots and mass chaos for at least 5 years now. You can't stay stuck in the woketard 2010s forever, like some out-of-touch Boomer who is permanently living through the late '60s and early '70s, whether they loved it or hated it. Time has moved on -- and so must you.
Girls will be more and more receptive of sincerity in the coming years, but including right now. It's a two-way street, though...
Just, for the love of god, close your Twitter feed if that's what you think girls or women are like. Any post that "breaks containment" is proof that it's only being boosted by those who want to stay permanently stuck in the 2010s culture war / battle of the sexes caged death match on steroids. You can leave that cage any time you want, and Just Be Yourself.
Girls out there (not big accounts on Twitter), want to Just Be Themselves, too.
As for which faction of GOP will abandon ship? Possibly energy, like oil and gas producers -- they just got their most expensive investments RAPED TO DEATH by the fat orange retard and the military shit-for-brains who are the primary force in the Republican coalition.
ReplyDeleteThey had billions upon billions invested in natural gas in Qatar and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, took years to build, instantly wiped out due to Trump and rightoid morons bombing Iran, who were quick to strike back at their enemies rather than sit around and take it like a bitch, as America itself would (never got revenge against Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab monarchies, who committed literal 9/11 against America).
That infrastructure is never coming back -- just look at the Francis Scott Key bridge fiasco in DC's backyard.
When some kind of infrastructure comes back, it will be controlled by Iran, not America. Either the Gulf Arab states will become clients of Iran, or Iran will continue controlling the Strait of Hormuz, as they already are. Any American energy companies who want a piece of that action will have to pay enormous penalties for belonging to the American political coalition that bombed Iran to begin with. Neutral parties will get better treatment, but not America -- how could they?
And by wiping out double-digit percentages of the global oil and gas supply, Trump and Republicans have set up an energy shortage here in America, which will cause prices to skyrocket. And since most of the world isn't energy-independent, that means American energy producers will prefer selling American oil at the sky-high global prices to foreign nations, like East Asia, rather than sell it for low prices here in America.
Trump and Republicans are already threatening the energy faction of their coalition, to not raise prices in the face of shortages which Trump and the military themselves caused by waging war against Iran. So now, not only are the massive investments wiped out for energy producers, they can't even pad their crash-landing by selling at high prices to the global market.
Oil is not a fake fungible thing like dollars that can just be printed up out of nowhere -- now that American energy producers have irrevocably lost their lifeline to Persian Gulf energy reserves, and their ability to get that stuff out of the Gulf for free, their entire business model has been blown up for no good reason.
That gives them one hell of a motive to defect and switch parties, unless they want to go down with the suicide cult surrounding Trump, the Pentagon, and dumbass Boomer voters.
And it gives them one hell of a re-branding campaign -- "In case anyone is confused, this was NOT a "war for oil", we got wiped out for good after begging the Pentagon to not be suicidal retards. Well, we're not going to go down with the suicide-pact of Trump's cultish Republican Party. The right wing is responsible for depriving Americans of affordable energy, so we must throw our support to the party that does NOT want to vaporize our energy-producing infrastructure, nor wipe out all the American jobs it creates..."
If any faction of the elite goes gangster enough to have Trump and the retard cult executed, it'll be the energy guys. They were the most loyal to Republicans, and got the most skull-fuckingly betrayed and materially ruined by them, now being slandered and berated by the causers of their ruin, just for good measure.
...If I were Donald Trump, I really wouldn't accept any offers to go quail shooting with Dick "The Hunter from Halliburton" Cheney...
Who says the re-make always has to be worse than the original? ^_^
Energy defecting to the Democrats. Would be really funny if the Republican Party eventually become the party complaining about climate change and the oil and natural gas industries causing global warming, while the Democrats become filled with climate change deniers. Climate science gets defunded from academia and blacklisted by the media because academia, media, and the energy industries are now in the same political coalition, and well can't have factions of the Democrats denouncing each other when they have to unite to fight the Republicans.
ReplyDeleteI spoke a nanosecond too soon about Dems protecting Platner, who they've just thrown under the bus in another risible #MeToo attempt. Talk about being stuck in 2015-2020 forever...
ReplyDeleteActually, the original MeToo took out a bunch of Zionists, now it's being turned against anti-Zionists.
Both the DNC types and the leftoids are linking arms to commit suicide in Maine, for the benefit of a Zionist Boomer Republican -- but it's a mostly white state, swing state, the candidate is a straight white guy and not grandfathered in as a Silent / Boomer perpetual power-holder. So what do they care?
He's actually a Millennial, born in '84, not a Gen X-er. For all the talk Dems give about being the party of youth, the future, etc., they'll sacrifice a Millennial to benefit a Boomer, if the Millennial doesn't tick any intersectional boxes, and the Boomer manages to tick at least one -- female.
Vance has not been thrown under the bus, despite being born in the same year, cuz he's a fag. Republicans love nothing more than closeted fags, and even trannies -- can't kick out Bruce Jenner from the tent, over 10 years later.
Like I said, I don't expect the Dems as a whole to be good. Here's one example where they applaud themselves for contracting and spreading AIDS -- they're supposedly the youth and anti-Zionist party, yet they're treating the self (Millennial anti-Zionist) as toxic, and waving through a hostile cancerous pathogen (Zionist Boomer).
I hope he keeps his campaign open, appeals only to Maine residents, not reacting avis on Twitter or even members of Congress, and wins with the people. He's gotten this far, his people aren't going to care about some half-baked and shameless last-ditch smear attempt by Zionist scum. It's not 2018 anymore, especially with voters. He should be a thorn in the side of the scum-suckers, as a reminder that only dumbass Boomer Republican voters in the South will get hoodwinked by Zionist smear campaigns, and not to try that with Democrats and Independents in stubborn New England.
Bernie Sanders is a traitor as well, he called Platner to end his campaign.
DeleteThis underscores the importance for Indies to not just sit on the sidelines, but weigh in on the Democrat power struggles. Overall, Dems are less cancerous than Republicans -- but there are still going to be cases of Dems being cancerous, and that requires as much of a dampening force as possible. If you keep voting Republican, or don't vote at all, then the successor to the Reagan era will be woketard scum Democrats, not Democrats who want to sever America's connections to the Israeli parasite, who want public healthcare like a normal country, etc.
ReplyDeleteI know, I know -- the DNC can literally shut down the internal election if it's not going how they want. Remember when Biden got obliterated during the primaries in 2020, with Bernie far in the lead, so the party just forced out every single candidate right before Super Tuesday, forcing them to endorse the voted-against candidate on their way out the door? I will never forget that -- shutting down their own party's election.
But even worse, forcing the candidate who had already dropped out and therefore received zero (0) delegates at the convention, to be the running mate and eventual VP and eventual prez candidate in the next cycle. Nobody wanted Harris -- so here you are, VP Harris.
Not only does the Democrat party need to win back the trust of their own voters, whose choices they robbed in spring 2020, and didn't even hold a primary in 2024, they need to convince Indies to join their coalition.
If we wanted to get shit all over, we'd vote Republican and ask for seconds.
If Dems don't respond and adapt and accomodate, Indies will just start executing the scum, breaking Flock cameras, and cleaning up the mess this country is in, by themselves. The big picture stuff is out of anyone's hands -- Israel will be stopped by Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, not leftoid activists posting on Twitter. The national debt is too big and exploding for random citizens to retire all those phony printed-up trillions of dollars. But they can pick off greedy CEO's, execute Israeli agents, execute Fox News slopagandists, tear down the physical surveillance network, sabotage the demolition of Midcentury American architecture, break open Boomer storage units and expropriate them and redistribute the good stuff to those who need it, and other such things.
We're such a dysfunctional auto-immune compromised corpse of a country, that it's a real litmus test in 2026 to say:
ReplyDelete"If I win, I will hinder, imprison, and execute my enemies, not my own supporters."
Republicans have been put to this test and failed, over and over.
This should be a lay-up for Democrats, but nobody is 100% insulated from the cancer of imperial collapse and the fraying of cohesion.
Bernie joining the pile-on is no surprise, he let himself get cucked by the BLM girls way back in 2015, and let himself get cucked by the shutting down of the 2020 primary while it was already under way, so that 4th-place Biden could be installed against the expressed will of the Dem voters, who wanted El Bernarino instead.
ReplyDeleteBernie's also a staunch Zionist, so if this is about Israel, that's all the more motive for him.
But the two "Arab" leftoids running in Michigan (Tlaib already elected, El-Sayed coming up) have also withdrawn support, and they're hardly staunch Zionists.
It looks more like an insider vs. outsider thing -- obviously Platner was against the Dem Establishment and machine. But he was not shat out from the DSA intersectionality factory either -- something that most moronic commentators are telling lies about, painting him as the DSA / prog activist favorite. He doesn't owe them his success either -- he won the primary with 72% to under 20% for the Establishment favorite (Boomer woman governor), with a few other candidates who came in with even less.
Contrast that to the Dem primary in the governor's race, whose 1st round saw an even 4-way split -- no clear fan fave there, vs. overwhelming dominance for Platner in the Senate primary.
That means Platner didn't get carried across the finish line thanks to a vanguard cadre of DSA / prog / campus activist / NGO types. He blew everyone else out, and not due to random luck with small number turn-out -- he got 120,000 votes in the primary of a small state that isn't psychotically Democrat to begin with.
That's insane support from the people of Maine, and the progtard activists are just jealous that they are not responsible for that, and therefore Platner and his team don't owe them anything special, should he win -- which he will, against a Republican Boomer mummy who's been there since forever and everyone wants gone.
So that's why progtards are linking arms with the corrupt machine that loses elections on purpose, if they can't get what they want -- they'd rather destroy a candidate who does not owe his victory to the machine or to the NGO / DSA radlibs. He threatens to provide a good example, a desirable role model for what voters want, that would marginalize the machine and progtard activist factions within the Dem party.
Speaking of Israel and Zionism, it's possible that the DSA sniffed out his anti-Zionism not being the progtard-approved brand of anti-Zionism, which must frame Zionism as a "white European" colonialism, and therefore blame white Europeans, prevent white Europeans (who are all white supremacists) from attaining power, and so on and so forth. Maybe he said he doesn't blame white people in general for Israel, but only the Israelis or specifically Jewish colonialists, wherever they came from (including lots of non-European Jews by now).
Progtards are rabid about destroying the Palestinian liberation movement by forcing this "white supremacist" narrative onto it, like it's still the woketard 2010s. Sorry, the global community has moved beyond that -- it's about dislodging the Jewish supremacists who have installed a Jewish state, of multinational original backgrounds, against the Palestinians of various religions and skin colors.
I don't think there was an open war over this issue, but the progtards probably sniffed something out -- that he wasn't minted by the woketard intersectionality factory, so he cannot be trusted, and in fact should be mistrusted, and prevented from taking office.
He and his team NEED to stick to their guns for the next week -- they won well over 100,000 votes in a small purple state's primary, blowing the former governor out of the goddamn water, garnering enough to pass a new constitutional amendment, if this were Congress. The people of Maine have spoken loudly and unambiguously -- and their will cannot be overturned at the eleventh hour by jealous bitter hater progtards, allying with the corrupt Boomer machine.
Stick to it! For the people of Maine!
Correction: Platner got over 156,000 votes, not 120. The largest primary turn-out in the state's history. There's a massive statewide corps of volunteers who are responsible for the historic wipe-out during the primary in June -- which itself was preceded by an 11th-hour attempt at a MeToo coup, which failed pathetically, and he went on to get 72%.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at pictures of the campaign, it looks like the iconic "America" ad for Bernie 2016 -- the good ol' days of New England insurgent populism, before Bernie got hijacked by woketards and the prog NGO network.
Check the Twitter account of someone, and you can see who is and is not being bought off by the NGO network. Abby Martin -- not. Kyle Kulinski -- not. Max Blumenthal -- not. Rania Khalek, Anya Parampil, Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur, Jenin Younes -- not, not, not, not, not. They do get audience donations and some institutional support, but IIRC, Abby Martin was funded by one of the Venezuelan left funds -- not a domestic American woketard NGO.
Not all vaguely left / progressive / etc. institutions are integrated into the sprawling network that includes just about all the other ones, most prominently the DSA, who reveal their membership in The Network by calling for Platner to drop out, despite his historic win.
There's lots of overlap on demographic factors -- race, ethnicity, sex, age, etc. -- so those aren't what's making some people try to hijack the Platner victory, and others stay on the sidelines or even actively call out the hijacking attempt. Where there's no overlap, and what entirely explains the difference -- is who's paying you. If you're in The Network, you're part of the hijacking attempt. If you're not, you're not, maybe even joining the effort to drive away the hijackers, who deserve no credit for the historic win.
DSA's Maine chapter never even formally endorsed Platner, they just "recommended" him or said they were simpatico or whatever. It was not an elite cadre of DSA grad students and law-degree-holders knocking on doors, etc. That's why they're so pissed at the historic win -- such a resounding, total victory, and they can't claim the smallest piece of the spoils, since they were largely uninvolved.
Nor did the big national NGO's send delegations to Maine, so they don't have any claim to the spoils either. Obviously the DNC Boomer machine has no claim, since they ran an oppo candidate in the primary.
Since 100% of the time, effort, and money that delivered the historic victory belongs to local Mainelanders (or whatever they're called!), the Boomer machine and The Network can go jump in the lake. They are in no position to dictate terms, and they hold no leverage, since his voters were not ginned up on either machine or Network rhetoric and themes and hand-outs.
It's just a straight-up hijacking attempt -- now that the local volunteer army wiped out the competition, try to take it over and steer it wherever the machine and The Network want it to go.
BULLSHIT -- tell The Network to go back to Twitter and whine all they want, Maine voters aren't going to let their hard-won grassroots victory get stolen right from under their noses by progtards who can't win a US Senate primary to save their lives, but only local US House races or mayoral races.
That's the other thing that scares the machine and The Network shitless -- this is a race for US Senate, which is statewide, and has to appeal to everyone across the spectrum in the state. They can't microtarget some favorable uber-prog environment, construct a pandering candidate, and make them a shoe-in. So far, that's the DSA strategy -- local prog niche, not statewide, let alone nationwide.
ReplyDeleteThe Platner campaign totally leapfrogged the local-only DSA-esque "movement", and dominated a statewide race with broad support, not microtargeting an already favorable niche demo, like AOC, Mamdani, and the others.
"Heh, cute House district you won there -- now watch this Senate race... ^_^"
Under absolutely NO CIRCUMSTANCES should this broad-based grassroots historic wipe-out victory be allowed to get hijacked by New York City NGO / media flunkies and Boomer machine mummies.
Not even him dropping out but naming his successor -- he hasn't lost! There's no succession! He won! Onward to the Capitol Building!
Dropping out and naming a successor would be totally illegitimate -- outside of the electoral process, robbing voters of their resoundingly expressed will. The Democrat Party has already overturned several elections during the 2020s, and they will only lose legitimacy and prevent their party from having buy-in, compliance, and consent of the governed, if they keep trying to overturn historic victories, just cuz the machine and the Network weren't responsible.
He needs to stay on the ballot not only cuz he deserves it, but he owes it to the vast grassroots army of supporters who sacrificed so much on his campaign's behalf.
Leaders don't desert the soldiers after a historic victory! They lead them toward the spoils, which get shared around to those who fought hard and won on the battlefield!
Especially when NYC media flunkies don't even have an army of their own to conduct this hijacking! That's the craziest thing -- what're they gonna do, whine harder on Twitter? You can't hijack a plane by threatening to slander the pilot on the internet! The attempted hijackers are like clueless children who think just sticking their hand-in-the-shape-of-a-gun into their jacket pocket, and pointing their finger at someone, will make them give up their stuff!
Such a comically inept attempt at a hijacking -- tell them to go point their hand-shaped-like-a-gun or their water pistol with the orange tip painted black, at someone more gullible!
Not in the fiercely indepdendent state of Maine, are people going to fall for that level of bullshit!
Another noteworthy absence in the latest witch-hunt -- AOC. So far, no comments either way. During the previous attempt to destroy the insurgent populist back in June, right before the vote was held, she declined to disavow, saying it was up to "the people of Maine" to decide among their choices.
ReplyDeleteMaybe she's just waiting a few days, like Bernie, we'll see. But she didn't join the insta-coup over the weekend. Aside from the grandfather of the DSA, Bernie, she's definitely *the* face of the Millennial DSA generational turnover in the Democrat Party.
Not like her comments will sway Maine voters one way or another, since the victory was resounding, but still worth noting that she's refraining from joining the party-delegitimizing pile-on to overturn the not-even-close expressed will of the party's own voters across an entire battleground state.
She doesn't even have to openly defend him, to stay out of the witch-hunt, just refrain from joining the fray.
All this BS will blow over by November, which is 4 months away, a lifetime in the propaganda cycle. Trump famously came back from the video-and-audio tape about "when you're a star, they let you grab 'em by the pussy", which dropped as the October surprise. Abandoned by nearly everyone, he stuck it out, and won in resounding fashion a month later.
ReplyDeleteWith the attempted hit on Platner, there's no video, no audio, no bombshell smoking gun texts, nothing. And already today more of the texts are leaking, which defuse the situation even further -- she texted him that she needs her glute massaged. There's surely more stuff like that to come out over 4 months.
And Maine voters will be tired after even 4 weeks of this bullshit will be tired of hearing about it. Let alone 4 months. They tuned out all the other hatchet jobs, they'll tune this one out too, especially after 4 long months of the propaganda cycle moving on.
Trump is going to get the American military wiped out even more disastrously throughout the Middle East.
Trump is going to have to own energy and gasoline shortages her in America, since the Persian Gulf will still be closed.
Trump will send grocery prices even higher.
Israel will be fucking up America's trajectory even further.
The AI bubble will be destroying the economy further, and the cancer of data centers and flock cameras will be spreading even further.
We still won't have universal health care, good jobs for Americans, or less billionaire control over politics.
And Boomer Zionist mummy Susan Collins will own all of this as well, since her party controls the entire federal government.
*That* is what Maine voters will be thinking about over the next 4 months -- not some stale 2010s-ass topic like MeToo, where there's no evidence to ponder anyway.
There is absolutely NO NEED to drop out or choose a successor. To the victor go the spoils!
Democrat Party overturns yet another primary, against their own voters, delegitimizing the outcome of the Maine Senate race, and hastening the party's own implosion.
ReplyDeleteLong-time readers may remember, but when I was doing political analysis, when it was worth half a shit to do so, I always said that the Democrats will be the party that implodes and becomes reborn as some different party, during the next major realignment. That's cuz we're near the Civil War stage of polarization and a realignment of the party system.
Leading up to the Civil War, the dominant party was Democrats (since Jackson), and the oppo party was the Whigs. In order to seize the mantle of dominant party leadership and chart a new way forward, the Whigs were demolished and reborn as the Republicans. The Whigs were thoroughly discredited during the Bleeding Kansas affair, where slavery was allowed to go unchecked into the Western territories, against the Missouri Compromise.
Since slavery was the major issue of the day, and they refused to do anything about it, their party imploded, and a staunchly anti-slavery party replaced it -- the Republicans, who took over the federal government, and ushered in a new party system with themselves as the dominant party, and the Democrats now as the oppo party.
Party realignments don't always result in one party imploding -- the only time it did, was the Civil War, due to the insane degree of partisan polarization. Nobody could possibly cross the aisle to the discredited and self-delegitimizing Whig party, so a whole new party had to be created, without the stain of the Whigs. Such a fresh new clean party, *was* able to attract cross-overs, who ditched the Jacksonian Democrats and joined the Lincoln Republicans, flipping which was dominant vs. oppo for the next many decades.
The last realignment in America was the death of the New Deal era, ushered in by Reagan in 1980 -- the neoliberal era, which we're still in. That didn't result in the death of either party, just some faction of one switching their loyalties, namely the military defecting from Dems to GOP, bringing along with them the Deep South, with its many military bases.
There was no party death cuz 1980 was near the minimum of polarization -- every presidential race was a blow-out for one party or the other, meaning the whole nation tended to vote the same way, one election after the other. If a different party won, it was due to the entire nation flipping. So, neither party had to die in order for a defection and cross-over to happen.
Fast-forward to the insanely partisan polarized 2020s, and very damn few Republican voters -- who may be Indies, or formerly loyal Republicans -- are willing to cross over to the Democrats, to flip who's dominant and who's oppo.
In order for a new era to be ushered in, the Democrats must implode as a party, and a fresh new clean one created in its place. That will not return America to utopia, but it will at least allow the necessary party realignment out of neoliberal stagflation. It will happen whether anyone wants it or not, just like during the Civil War.
Just as a reminder, during the Dem prez primary of 2020, the first four battleground states went atrociously for the machine favorite, Biden. He only won South Carolina, a deep red state that's irrelevant in a national election. In the swing / battleground / bellwether states of New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada, Bernie clobbered everyone else, Biden came in far behind, and literally anybody else was in between, like Buttgag, Klobuchar, anybody but Biden.
ReplyDeleteAhead of Super Tuesday, when dozens of state primaries were due to be held, and Bernie's dominant outcome would be confirmed -- the machine shut down the entire election, forcing out all the candidates, who one by one endorsed Biden on their unceremonious way out the door. With no one left to vote for, since all the in-demand candidates were forced to quit, Biden coasted to victory, against the will of all voters except for irrelevant South Carolina.
Even before Super Tuesday, though, Harris ended her campaign due to her pathetic polling and getting bitch-slapped by Tulsi Gabbard during a debate. She received zero (0) delegates at the national convention, cuz nobody voted for her -- she quit early, before any real voting had begun.
Who did the machine select as running mate? Harris -- the only one to have to quit so early, and not even get to coast through the rest of the shut-down elections like Biden did.
So, the very two candidates who Dem voters thoroughly rejected -- Biden and Harris -- were installed as the prez and VP candidates on the ballot, over-riding the expressed will of zillions of voters, who unambiguously said "HELL NO" to both of them.
This delegitimized their eventual occupation of office, since nobody had voted for them. That's why, even though Dem voters were OK with their party stealing the general election from Trump, they still told Biden to fuck off during his administration. Most notably, the chasm that erupted over the issue of Palestine and Israel, even before October 7 2023, but going crazy afterward.
If the choice of the voters, Bernie, had been cleared for nominee status, Dem voters would have behaved far more obediently toward the White House and government in general during that term. But since Biden represented the robbery and over-riding of their choice, they owed him no loyalty or deference or compliance -- and they behaved accordingly, disobediently.
Then, when the 2024 nomination process began, the machine let Biden assume he was the presumptive nominee, and no primary elections were held whatsoever. This robbed the Dem voters of a chance to express their will -- for the incumbent, for someone else, and if so, who among many potential who-elses?"
ReplyDeleteThere was an 11th-hour coup against the senile incumbent, who was unceremoniously forced to quit the race, and had to endorse the coup victor on his way out the door. That was Harris, the sitting VP, but who nobody had voted for -- not during the 2024 season, since no elections were held at all, nor even during the 2020 season, since she quit before voting began and received no delegates.
This delegitimized her nominee status during the general election, when Dem operatives were either unwilling or unable to orchestrate an election theft like in 2020, with pallets of ballots arriving at 4AM for days, weeks, and months after the election was alread over, skewing 99% Democrat, and only in battleground states.
With no operatives willing or able to pull of a steal, Harris was compelled to win on her merits. And since the party delegitimized her by selecting her without asking voters to vote for her, and indeed over-riding the previous season when voters outright rejected her in the primary, Dems didn't turn out in droves for her, Indies felt slapped in the face and willing to gamble on another Trump term. The result: what should have occurred on 2020, without the pallets of ballots, resounding Trump victory.
For, Trump was not a party insider, hand-selected by elites, let alone representing the over-riding, over-turning, and slapping in the face of the party's voters. Exactly the opposite -- the GOP machine actually allowed the choice of the voters to be honored, and did not alienate and infuriate their own voters. Not during the electoral process, anyway -- Trump betrayed his voters only after taking office and doing the bidding of the party elites (like war against Iran for Israel).
It is not a distinction without a difference -- Trump voters are far more willing to put their faith, even if it's just a hail mary pass, in the next round of Republican primary elections, to choose someone who might accomplish what Trump promised but reneged on. Their party respected their choice of nominee, which gives them faith in the electoral process -- relatively more so than Dem voters, anyway, whose party has repeatedly over-turned their own voters' express will, and given them no reason to trust that the next primary election will be any better, if it is even held at all.
ReplyDeleteTrue, lots of Trump voters feel betrayed and won't vote for him -- he's term-limited anyway, so no loss to the GOP there. If voters generalize this betrayal to the entire administration or party leadership, the GOP still allows its voters to choose new representatives during the next primary cycle. They may not get their wish during primary season, like Lindsey Graham still sitting in South Carolina's Senate seat, but they have not lost hope in the primary electoral process itself.
And that allows for another round of it to go on, and on and on and on, until and unless the GOP starts delegitimizing the process by shutting down elections that are already under way, preventing elections from being held, or over-turning the blow-out results of elections that have already been decided by the voters.
With this latest case of the Democrat Party over-riding its own primary voters, in what was a totally unambiguous election result, they further delegitimize not only the particular race they intervened in -- but their party as a whole. Who wants to obey a party that doesn't let its voter vote, shuts down their voting when it's already under way, or over-turns the result if they don't like it?
Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, and three times is pattern. I may have missed other examples from the 2022 cycle, when I wasn't paying attention.
They did not do this before 2020, but it is rapidly hardening into their new normal for the collapsing stage of the American Empire. However, one party committing suicide is not a stable solution, it only opens up a power vacuum, where some fresh new clean party will take its place, as it implodes under its self-administered delegitimization.
As of 2020, Democrats seem to have given up on acquiring legitimacy by popular participation and assent before their attempt to rule -- which means that, even if they get into office, nobody will obey their dictates, and nothing will get done.
ReplyDeleteThis latest over-turning of the Maine Senate primary is not a nationwide race, so other Dem Senators may be deferred to and obeyed, where they were actually the result of a legitimate election. But 2 of the 3 over-turnings of Democrat primaries, have involved presidential elections -- and that really says where their mind's at, more than dinky little House or mayoral races.
They should have learned how flagrantly they were disobeyed, by Trump voters and Biden voters alike, during the Biden usurper term. That was totally the opposite of Obama's two terms, where they did not shut down elections, refuse to hold elections, or over-turn elections that were already decided by voters.
Therefore, nobody disobeyed Obama during his whole two terms. And no, a handful of Tea Party protesters waving signs is not widespread civic disobedience, or mass non-compliance. They might not have liked what Obama was doing, but they didn't consider it the result of an illegitimate electoral process, to be ignored. So they grumbled and went along with it, hoping to undo it the next time by winning an election for a Republican.
When they shifted to "damn the elections, the elites will impose whoever they want" in the 2020s, they began the process of destroying their own party, since that violates the most fundamental precepts of representative democracy. And no, no amount of noob observations about how money in politics can influence the outcome, or how office-holders may reneg on their campaign promises, can bat those concerns away.
People may be cynical about the array of influences at work during the electoral process, but if it is itself delegitimized, then all bets are off for compliance among the governed when the office-holder takes office. It's not just "Well, they're bought off by corporations, not me, so I don't have to obey them". Nobody actually behaves that way, refusing to send taxes or whatever, just cuz of billionaire donations to campaigns.
But when elections are not allowed to be held, when they are shut down when already under way, or when they are over-turned after already decided by voters -- that strikes at the integrity of the electoral process itself, delegitimizes the outcome, and therefore invites and indeed MORALLY PERMITS the citizenry to disobey the illegitimate office-holder to whatever degree they feel comfortable.
"Elections are just the illusion of choice anyway, the two parties are the same, etc etc etc" -- another observation that does not say the electoral process itself has been subverted. In the view of the critic, sure, but the mass of the citizenry does not believe that big money in campaigns literally subverts and delegitimizes the outcome -- they obey the outcomes of elections with such big-money influences in them, all the time.
It's only when the formal decision-making process itself is subverted, that the masses are wont to disobey, counter-signal, or otherwise withdraw the consent of the governed. It's cheating, it's breaking the rules, it's "heads I win, tails you lose", it's turning over the chessboard when your opponent was about to checkmate you. Everyone can see how unambiguously illegitimate such actions are, and -- unlike when they merely have influences at play against them -- feel emboldened to disregard the so-called authority of the office-holder.
In a different time and place, other formal mechanisms may decide who occupies authority offices -- but in America, we hold elections with the general public. That is the only way to decide the outcome. And whenever the electoral process itself is formally subverted -- no election, shut-down election, over-turned election -- only *then* are all bets off for the masses complying with the wannabe authority figures, who will be unable to govern them, lacking legitimacy in the popular perception.
ReplyDeleteLegitimacy, authority, and such, are all socially constructed -- if we all agree that X is the rightful office-holder, he occupies the office, and we obey what his team says (within reason). If we reject that X is the rightful office-holder, he may or may not occupy the office, but we will feel free to obey his team or not, according to our own individual preferences, not submitting them to a higher collective will embodied by his team -- since he has received no such higher collective assent through the formal mechanism of deciding who gets into the office.
When we had a healthy empire, electoral strategists, party insiders, elites, and even grunt-level door-knockers, all realized this -- and sought all sorts of ways to persuade, motivate, and reward voters to vote for their candidate. It not only strengthened the authority of the particular office-holder, it strengthened the entire system of power, since voters put their trust and blind faith into it, and were not turned away from the voting booth, robbed of their candidate, over-turned, or prevented from expressing their will in the first place.
Now that our empire is collapsing, the power structure will start to give up on the quest for acquiring legitimacy before occupying office. So far, Republicans have respected the sanctity of the electoral process, while feeling callous to slap their voters across the face when they actually take office. Again, that still keeps GOP (and leaning) voters inside the system, since their faith in the system itself has not been shaken. Just vote next time for a candidate with a better track record, or whatever.
Democrats, however, are destroying the sanctity of the election itself, and that leaves Dem (and leaning) voters will no rational reason to hope for and trust that a better outcome may happen next time around. This alienates and frustrates them in a structural, fundamental way -- not just being angry at particular promise-betrayers like Trump-in-office vs. Trump-while-campaigning.
Sooner than later, that spells the implosive doom of the Democrat Party per se, to be reborn as a fresh new clean party, that will respect elections and draw in defectors from the GOP who have given up on Trump and MAGA (but not the electoral process itself).
In the meantime, though, it may actually embolden Democrat citizens to start taking equally illegitimate counter-measures -- if you character-assassinate our widely chosen candidate and revoke his ballot status, why don't we just bodily-assassinate our state Dem party leadership who made that decision? Why don't we set off bombs at their headquarters? Why don't we impose other costs on them, which will not lead to a more legitimate outcome, but will at least keep the score even between the great big delegitimizer and us humble legitimacy-seekers?
ReplyDeleteSince the recent peak of civic breakdown has ended, circa 2020, this is unlikely to take the form of literal assassinations or bombings or riots and property destruction across the Democrat base. But I wouldn't put it past a lone Luigi Mangione or Elias Rodriguez to get revenge at a lone representative of the election-over-turning party elites.
As always, the party has a choice to nip this in the bud, and restore legitimacy to their elections. But given their pattern of escalation -- from shutting down an election in progress, to refusing to hold on, to OVER-TURNING one that was already decided by 72% -- that seems doubtful. In collapsing empires, wicked scum rise to the top. So they will probably only get worse about legitimizing their office-holders, and hasten their party suicide, to be replaced by a (relatively) more honest, fresh new clean party to finally shift America out of the neoliberal Reagan era.
I will still be eagerly voting for Acton, to prevent Ramaswamy from being upwardly-failed into governor of a real state, rather than being sent back to India in exile like the anti-American scammer scum that he is. I'll probably vote straight-ticket Dem as well, just to prevent MAGA-tards from fucking things up here any further.
ReplyDeleteBut that's cuz she is a legitimate candidate, not the result of over 150,000 primary voters choosing someone else by 72% and the party elites over-turning the result and hand-picking her with no input from voters, AKA another election, which was already held!
If Newsom gets the nom legitimately in 2028, that will be another easy vote, against closeted fag Vance who's trying to establish an Indian power base in America via his in-laws and their quest to found an Indian-American dynasty.
But if the Democrat Party delegitimizes another election that I can actually vote in, I'll just vote Green or for an Independent, and happily disobey the eventual office-holder, if it's the illegitimate Dem.
And as of now, every citizen of Maine is morally allowed to disobey whoever their next Senator is -- whether the illegitimately selected Dem, if they win, or Collins if she wins due to the illegitimate Dem being weak. Platner would've wiped the floor with Collins, so if the illegitimate Dem loses, Collins is not legitimate either.
Destroying the sanctity of the formal mechanisms themselves is so difficult to come back from, at this point there would need to be 3 to 4 election cycles (through 2032 at least) where Democrats do not delegitimize a single election, just to expect us citizens to call it even and let bygones be bygones. I don't know that they have the centralized discipline to force that onto their operatives and lower-level branches, or the will to do so in the first place. But that is now the bare minimum requirement for putting trust in them as a party, rather than opportunistically voting for this or that particular Dem candidate, like Acton for Ohio gov.
This is not about feminism or MeToo, but electoral over-turning by the party operating the election just cuz they didn't like the result.
ReplyDeleteBy now everyone knows that politicized feminists, Democrats, etc. don't actually care about women's rights, preventing rape, bla bla bla -- that's just a cover for grabbing power. They enable and protect all manner of rapists, most infamous Bill Clinton, one of the most high-profile visitors of Epstein Island.
And the same is true for right-wing feminists. It just has nothing to do with preventing rape, punishing rapists, and so on. It's a power grab.
Real rape claims are submitted to the police, not the media. They are adjudicated by criminal courts, not the media. And if guilty, punishment is meted out by the prison system (or a fine or whatever), not by the media or political committees. And this criminal justice ball gets rolling ASAP, not years or decades later during an 11th-hour political stunt.
Politicized accusations of rape never follow the pattern of real rape claims, so we can dismiss them as attempts to grab power instead -- duh, that's why they're launched during a political power struggle. Once that struggle is over -- regardless of whether the accuser's side won, or lost -- the claim vanishes, never to be heard of again. That's what will happen with the claim against Platner, too.
And although it may come to a shock to right-wingers, feminists per se cannot grab power -- they aren't an organized political collective unit, they don't meet with each other, they aren't a distinct bloc or faction within a political coalition, and they don't wield whatever power they have as a unit.
Real, actual power blocs are the military, the banks, the media, agriculture, manufacturing, the schools, etc. There could be ethnic blocs, but that depends and is usually restricted to just one or two. Like African-Americans are a bloc, but Hispanics are not -- too diverse among themselves -- nor are Asian-Americans (ditto), or Muslim Americans (ditto), or anything-else Americans, really. Including whites.
It's just African-Americans who behave politically like a bloc, and even that is tied into the sectors of the economy rather than to matters of ethnicity -- they're the former slaves from the plantation agriculture sector, who were brought into the political mainstream with citizenship and political representation of their own, after other sectors like manufacturing defeated the planter sector during the Civil War.
Women, feminists, anti-feminists, mothers, never-mothers, single women, married women, divorced women, boy-moms, girl-moms, butt girls, boob girls, blondes, brunettes, virgins, sluts -- none of these has any political relevance, only kinship and dating/mating relevance, and they therefore do not form blocs within political coalitions, or influence national power struggles.
So, there is no primary power that lies with women, feminists, etc., and gets deployed via trumped-up accusations of rape at the enemy of feminism, knocking them out of the power struggle. Since they have no primary power of their own, they can only be used as attack dogs for some bloc that *does* have real power.
In this case, the best guess is "the Israel lobby", but there could have been others as well, like "Democrat party leaders", who have power over the formal mechanisms determining who gets into offices of the state.
And *that* is what this is really about -- the Democrat Party over-turning an election that was already held a month ago, with historic turn-out and an unambiguous mandate for the victor, with 72% of the vote.
ReplyDeleteThe party elites didn't like the choice that the voters made, so they are nullifying it, plain and simple. Possibly other actors like the NGO Network are upset at the voters' choice, for different reasons than the party elites, but still, they hated the result enough to join the pile-on and try to hijack the already-decided election to benefit a candidate of their own choosing, not the one already chosen unambiguously by the voters.
However, although the motive for election nullification is plain and simple, the communication of that nullification to the public who voted, cannot be so nakedly stated. If they plainly say, "We don't like who you chose, so we're over-riding that, and will pick someone we like instead", their legitimacy as a party is instantly undone. Nobody will participate in a party that behaves like that.
So they need some morally approved way to nullify the voters' choice. They cannot try to frighten voters away from the choice -- they already tried that, on the same topic of MeToo (and the Nazi-coded tattoo), at the 11th hour before the vote took place. It failed pathetically, he got 72%, with historic turn-out, proving Maine voters don't care about this crap. It didn't dampen his support one iota.
Rather, the coup under way now is an 11th-hour stunt before the *certification* of the primary's winner, by the party leaders. The election itself has been decided for over a month. This intervention is to prevent the winner from being certified, thereby blocking his further path to the ballot in the general election.
And now that Platner has dropped out, that much of the coup has succeeded. He won't be on the general election ballot.
If they can't state their motive plainly, party leaders must pick some rationalization that they hope will resonate most with the audience, like voters in an election whose doubts mistrust and anger they're trying to assuage.
In a different time and place, they would've said, "Sorry, we know you like this guy, but we have credible allegations that he was seen cavorting with witches, sacrificing goats, and kissing the Devil's asshole -- so, we cannot as guardians of the process, allow him to appear on the ballot. We will choose someone else instead, who has not been credibly accused of flying through the air on a broomstick".
But in 2020s America, we don't believe in witches or God or Jesus or the Devil, our moral themes are about human rights. And on the Democrat side, especially about the theme of a woman's bodily autonomy -- which has ancient roots, since every culture bans and punishes rape. Notice how, despite being obsessed with ethnic identity politics, the go-to accusation of witchcraft is not "his childhood friend said he used to call people the n-word on Xbox Live in 2007". That's not a primal-brain theme, but rape is. So, rape it is, as the go-to human rights / morality theme, when crafting a rationalization for a naked power grab.
And it is only to this extent that the feminist attack dogs are unleashed, and the media set to work disseminating the claims.
If such claims had power in themselves, then anyone could launch them at anyone else, and they would do equal damage -- like pointing a loaded gun and pulling the trigger. But that's not true -- see Joe Biden, who was the target of a MeToo attempt in early 2020. But since he was the party elites' favorite, the claims went nowhere, and he was installed as the nominee despite coming in 4th place among voters when there were still choices available. Likewise why Bill Clinton has not been exiled or assassinated by Democrats -- he's their party elites' favorite, and therefore has a bullet-proof vest against attempts to accuse him of witchcraft.
More on the theme of "words are not magic" and have no power or force or even inherent meaning of their own, only what we the speakers and hearers socially construct them to have.
ReplyDeleteLooking back for even earlier examples of this election over-turning pattern among the Democrat Party, I was reminded of their last-ditch attempt to over-turn the 2016 election via the Electoral College. That acts as a certification stage, after the election has already been decided. They didn't even think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell of winning, so they had no Plan A -- Hillary Clinton was going to win every single state, so why plan for if she doesn't? That's inconceivable!
When they got caught flat-footed on election night 2016, they scrambled to over-turn the result. And what did all that brainstorming come up with? "Let's start a rebellion in the Electoral College!" Well, they did get their wish -- but it widened Trump's margin even further, since hardly any of his electors defected, but quite a few Clinton electors defected to Bernie or some other figure.
They never tried a stunt like that before, and it was the beginning of their delegitimization of the nationwide electoral process, and therefore, of its outcomes.
But putting aside the Democrats' sabotage of the victories of *the other party*, what about their own, which is the relevant category here? During the 2016 Dem primary, the party elites actually did threaten to nullify the voters' choice -- that's when everyone found out what superdelegates are at the national nominating convention. They are not chosen by voters, but by the party leaders, and they get to cast a vote in the nomination. They are not so numerous that they can over-turn a 72% victory -- for that, you need a fake rape claim -- but they're still numerous enough to over-turn a majority winner.
As it turned out, this was not necessary, since Clinton won with the primary voters, although Bernie came pretty close. But they made it very clear throughout the primary, if Bernie merely got a slim majority, that would not prevent the superdelegates from over-turning it.
Party leaders kept insisting that "these are the rules, and the rules are the rules, and we must all respect the rules" -- no we do not. You can't program people's brains, certainly not by nagging them like that. Legitimacy is socially constructed. If the audience observes a primary where Bernie won 53% of the vote, and the superdelegates form an anti-Bernie bloc, depriving him of the nomination at the convention, everyone sees this as illegitimate. Probably the anti-Bernie people would add, "and who said illegitimacy is a bad thing?!"
But words are not magic -- just cuz you say, "these rules are the way they are, and as long as the process adheres to the rules, ipso facto the result is legitimate, and you must treat the result as legitimate". Mmm... no it is not, and no we do not. A result is only legitimate if the observers perceive it to be, and publicly agree that it is.
What if a chess tournament's rules allow a player, upon seeing that his opponent is going to checkmate him in a few moves, to overturn the table, board, and pieces, and win by default? Hey, it's in "the rules", you can't argue with "the rules". Actually, we can -- the winner is whoever we agree it is, and maybe that coincides with who the referees say it is, but not necessarily. And if we see the "overturn the board when you're about to get got" move, then certainly we declare the flipper the loser and his opponent the winner.
Seeing a majority winner get rug-pulled by unelected party insiders, just cuz the leaders don't like the choice that voters made, is flagrantly illegitimate, not just kinda-sort illegitimate. And it doesn't matter what "the rules" say. Rules are only words, and they don't enforce themselves, not do they force certain perceptions, opinions, interpretations, conclusions, or behavioral responses, from the readers of those words.
ReplyDeleteIf that scenario had unfolded, the party would have failed to construct legitimacy for the nominee, and Clinton would have been treated accordingly. As it was, they didn't need to resort to delegitimizing tactics to win the primary, so most of the Bernie voters swallowed their pride and voted for Clinton in the general. A sizable minority of Bernie voters defected to Trump in the general, but not cuz they saw Clinton as an illegitimately selected Dem candidate -- they just didn't like her platform, so chose otherwise. Nothing to do with legitimacy, though.
Although they didn't end up delegitimizing that primary outcome, they were threatening to do so the entire time, if Bernie should win. Those threats from all over, coming in constantly, were themselves a source of delegitimization -- cuz beyond not commiting illegitimate acts, you're not even supposed to threaten them. Like if a president threatens to drop nukes on a state if it doesn't vote for him -- just the threat delegitimizes him regarding the use of force, and the citizens are then justified to assassinate him pre-emptively, since that's no minor threat to make against your own subjects.
Like so much else in our current collapsing shithole society, the ball truly got rolling only in 2016, although some of the background sentiment had been percolating for longer back into to 2000s and late '90s. Just the threat of over-turing a Bernie victory using the superdelegates, was enough to delegitimize the outcome, which favored Clinton anyway. Not as delegitimizing as if they simply shut down the voting and said "It's Hillary, bitch, like it or leave it". But still, delegitimizing, and a bad taste that never left the voters' mouths.
How does a president come back from threatening to bomb his own citizens? He can't -- it's off with his head. How can a party come back from threatening to over-turn the votes of their own voters? They can't -- off with their heads, fresh new clean party instead!
Also in economic sectors, there is an all out war going on between tech vs news media / entertainment sectors over whether LLMs violate copyright. See e.g. this lawsuit:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_v._Microsoft_and_OpenAI
Platner cannot withdraw. So far, he's keeping the paperwork until the last minute, on Monday -- and he must absolutely not file it, since dropping out means...
ReplyDelete1. Everyone will believe he was a rapist, even though the accusation is totally bogus. "Platner dropped out of the race after being credibly accused of rape," is how his memory will be preserved. By staying in the race, he proves he has nothing to apologize or atone for, that he weathered a hit piece.
2. All other replacements would be illegitimate, since nobody voted for them -- and if it's anyone other than the roundly rejected Boomer governor, no one else was even running and on the ballot. An illegitimately selected candidate, like Harris 2024, would implode all the popular grassroots momentum around Platner, and doom the party's chances in the general.
3. Illegitimacy is a categorical yes/no thing, it's not quantitative / degree. Every single other choice is illegitimate, and would have the same effect on imploding the momentum, tarnishing the party's reputation for pulling yet another over-turning of a popular vote, and dooming the chances of winning the general. "B-b-but, this other guy is somewhat aligned with Platner on some key things" -- sorry, he wasn't running before, it's too late to sub him in. In voters' eyes, candidates are not fungible, that's why they vote for A instead of B. They have rallied around Platner, and only Platner, so it doesn't matter who the replacement would be -- all would be illegitimate.
4. Specifically, one of the potential usurpers is DSA-approved Troy Jackson, who already ran and lost in the Dem primary for governor of Maine this exact same year, with the exact same electorate. He was one of the 4-way tie candidates for the first two rounds, was eliminated after the 3rd round, and did not appear in the final showdown. In percentages, he got 20-25% initially, approximately 50,000 votes -- WAY behind Platner's 72% and 156,000 votes. He'd get wiped, and that's already proven, not hypothetical, given both of their performances in this primary cycle.
5. Selecting an illegitimate candidate over the resounding will of the voters will collapse the electorate's trust in the Democrat Party for the indefinite future. Although most of the blame lies with the party leaders for attempting to over-turn the election, Platner would be complicit as well in destroying the party's trust with voters, if he drops out, by showing the voters that even the person they thought was a hopeful role model, acquiesced to the machine's illegitimate bullshit after all. This would also destroy the voters' trust in supposed populists, outsiders, insurgents, etc. Non-Republican electoral politics would never recover in Maine.
6. Pragmatically, Platner is the best bet for winning, since no one else even came close at the ballot box. The sitting governor got obliterated, the other candidate was invisible, and the candidates in other races like for governor didn't come anywhere close to his numbers either. All others would be untested this cycle. You don't improve your odds of winning by picking people who performed infinitely worse with the same voters, or who haven't been tested with voters whatsoever.
7. The accusations were nothing new, the exact same MeToo / tattoo smears were launched at the 11th hour before the actual vote was held over a month ago -- and it landed with an absolute whisper. Nobody in the fiercely independent state of Maine gives a flying fuck about what New York City media-meisters think is scandalous. They absorbed this avalanche of hit pieces -- and voted for him at 72% anyway, with historic turn-out.
8. Anything primarily pushed by the media will backfire in Maine, since all of New England hates New York City's guts, more than any other place on Earth, and that's where all the media, consulting, NGO's, etc. are located. If anything, media hit pieces will boost Platner's appeal among Mainers, who would love to give the finger to New York City PR homos, the next time they visit their local ballot box, and prevent their hero from becoming martyred by the garbage dump nemesis that is New York City.
ReplyDelete9. Maine is a textbook Bernie-Trump state, rural, rough around the edges, older than average, largely white, not zealous Democrats or Republicans, former manufacturing hub that got destroyed by NAFTA, although a few of the old shoe factories are miraculously holding on there. Maine voters will instantly see through any attempt to revive this pathetic lazy stale hit-piece during the general -- "Ah jeez, Lois, it's like they're tryin' ta do dat whole Pussygate tape wit' Trump all ovah again... When will they evah get a friggin' clue?"
10. The Dem leadership is threatening to withhold funding, or access to the voter file, if Platner remains on the ballot. Well, guess what happens if anyone remotely like him remains on the ballot! That's right, they get bupkis as well. The leaders don't have it in for this one specific individual -- they're trying to wipe out everyone like him, platform-wise. They're already trying to shove El-Sayed out of the Michigan Senate primary. And any replacement, again, has pathetic vote counts, or wasn't even running -- so they would have even less leverage than Platner and his grassroots army to demand anything from the party leaders. They would be all the more easily sidelined by party leaders. And they wouldn't have the grassroots army to tap into for fundraising, canvassing, etc., if the party leaders actually followed through on their threat (which so far is only a threat).
11. There's no mechanism to guarantee the Platner campaign's choice of replacement would actually be the one who the party installs. First the position needs to be vacated, and then a replacement chosen. Since they have no motive to honor their promise after he's formally vacated, they will choose one of their own garbage-dump eaters, and his campaign will have zero leverage to force them back into honoring their promise. Likewise for if they selected some random progressive -- the Platner campaign has no way to ensure that such a replacements gets the funding and voter file access that he was supposedly going to be denied. All of his potential replacements face an infinitely weaker position at the bargaining table, and must be excluded.
So, since all options are worse, the only solution is to stay in the race -- literally, do nothing over the weekend and Monday, and this battle will be settled.
Speaking of Maine shoe factories, Collins voted for the China trade bill in 2000, she's such a Boomer neoliberal Reaganite mummy, she's been there *that* long. She is personally responsible for the de-industrialization of her home state, and of America as a whole.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1062/vote_106_2_00251.htm
She first joined the Senate in 1997, but you *know* she would've voted for NAFTA if she'd been there 4 years earlier. No question.
Sadly, the other Maine Senator in 2000 voted for the China trade bill, but he was a Republican like Collins.
And now that the neoliberal Reaganites have totally fucked up the global supply chains that they worked so diligently to construct since the '80s, they're also responsible for the shortages etc. that we'll be facing going forward, since we no longer have the domestic industrial capacity.
That's a VERY simple topic to absolutely wallop Collins' brains out. "When I represent Maine in the Senate, I will not vote for any bill that would off-shore what precious little remains of our American manufacturing -- thanks to Collins herself."
Manufacturing is the only way to provide comfortable living standards for a broad range of people, the once-prosperous middle class and working class. Collins personally voted to flush that broad-based prosperity right down the toilet just so corporate owners could pinch a few pennies more in profit -- and not even pass that on to consumers with lower prices!
Even if not a single factory returns to American shores, we must still punish those responsible for destroying our standard of living. Grave crimes require grave consequences.
The Lord himself had to overturn the primary election of Lindsey Graham, since South Carolina Boomers were still committed to their Zionist heresy.
ReplyDeleteBurn in Hell, neocon faggot.
God willing, his Millennial replacement, the current VP, will get taken out as well. The last thing America needs is Emo Lindsey Graham...
The way to ensure that the neighbors don't file a noise complaint when you're belting out along to power-pop tunes -- make sure to include some good ol' songs from the '60s and '70s, to make the Boomers feel included, and part of the continuity of history.
ReplyDelete"Needles and Pins" and "Love Potion Number 9" by the Searchers, "Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison, "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies, "I Want You to Want Me" by Cheap Trick, "Cruel to Be Kind" by Nick Lowe.... and so on and so forth.
Then they won't mind a little "Teenage Dirtbag", "Stacy's Mom", and "Just the Girl" from the (otherwise bleak) 21st century. ^_^
My So-Called Life DVD set finally acquired! I've been looking for awhile, and it was only $20 for the whole series, AKA the one and only season... at 19 episodes, it was brief for its time, when 26 was the norm -- and yet, compared to today, that's like 2 seasons jam-packed into 1!
ReplyDeleteThe Zoomer girl at the cash register was on her first day, so I made sure to make some pleasant small talk, like "don't worry, the customers here aren't going to bite". I told her I watched it when it first came out, and even in re-runs on MTV.
"...When was it on?" is how she coyly asked me my age. Hehe. I told her, "'94 or '95" -- not saying "19--" first, cuz when you're talking about *the* century to end all centuries, it's understood. You can just say "the '80s" or "'95".
Then we started gabbing about physical media, and how this series used to be on Hulu like 10-15 years ago, then it was on ABC.com's website, and then... who the hell knows where it is now? Possibly nowhere. She said, "yeah, you always have to keep up with where it's streaming, when it's going to be taken off, etc." Yep, she gets it. Good ol' Zoomers. ^_^
So I said that's why I get "physical media, baby". "Physical media!" she said, surprised, like "did this guy just speak online IRL...?"
Also, how are young girls supposed to use a transaction at the checkout, as an excuse to reach out and touch your hand -- if they're not handing you physical discs from the drawer behind the counter? If we lived in a digital download-only world, nobody would ever make small talk with you, look into your eyes, or touch your hand, at the check-out counter... it makes it more than just an everyday transaction. It makes it a pleasant little memory, and a teeny-tiny connection, which you just can't get by tapping a screen and transfering a file to your memory storage device.
Plus, just the phrase "physical" media -- who doesn't wanna get physical? Even bookworms. ^_^
I just got flash memory of working at the check-out counter at the library during college. The records were already computerized -- no more index cards. But it was still very physical and hands-on. We still used inked rubber stamps, with those moveable type "month / day" wheels, onto a paper slip inside the back cover. Of course the book itself was physical, not a download!
ReplyDeleteAnd the check-out was still in-person, not self check-out.
...If the girls thought you were cute / hot, they would absolutely caress, or even fondle your hand when you handed them back their ID card after scanning it. They didn't pick it up by the tiniest little corner space, like you had the plague. They would reach way back to your main knuckle row, and then stroke your fingers all the way down to the tips, seamlessly sliding the card right out of your hand, like a magic trick.
They didn't even try to be sly about it, and would look you right in the eyes, like "that's right, Mr. Whoever-You-Are, that wasn't your imagination..."
I hate to think of all those tactile memories that might have been, for the check-out desk workers who came after me. It's so impersonal and distant, just watching a file of faces staring down at the scanner, from 10 feet away...
I don't check out much from the library anyway, I mainly go there to browse the books for sale. Much better for making small-talk about the cool illustration on the cover of a vintage paperback. ^_^
It was this one, BTW. Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" (Pocket Books, 1964).
ReplyDeletehttps://postmarkedfromthestars.com/products/the-simple-art-of-murder-raymond-chandler-1964-3rd-pocket-books-paperback
Also scored the DVD set of Beverly Hills 90210, seasons 1 and 2, a little bit ago from the same used bookstore. I already saw season 1 on pluto.tv for free, but got the DVD's just to be sure. I'd started watching season 2 on pluto, but figured I might as well do the DVD's for that season as well -- and wouldn't you know it? There are EIGHT (count 'em, 8) missing episodes from that season on all streaming platforms. Out of a total of 28 episodes, that's 30% of the season!
ReplyDeleteThe excuse is "copyright reasons" about music, but that's BS. Almost all of the hit music from the broadcast has been replaced by generic commisioned bla-di-bla. It's more like they don't want a certain character to appear, or certain themes that are problematic to woketards -- like high school girls pursuing their cute teacher outside of class. But also the Christmas episode, and others that don't seem to have much reason to be deleted.
It's crazy -- and only by relying on physical media can you safely watch, and preserve, these iconic works in their entirety.
I'm really diggin' this show, I always assumed it was just some tawdry soap opera for teens, but it's the original teen drama TV series, John Hughes for the small screen. I would say it's like "normie My So-Called Life", or My So-Called Life is like "Alt 90210", but actually 90210 has far more very special episodes, and its biker bad-girl wild-child is not just eccentric -- she really goes off the deep-end, in a way that Rayanne Graff never would. Emily Valentine, BPD punk rock girl extraordinaire... who winds up dating the wholesome protag transplanted from Minnesota, Brandon Walsh.
Everybody was connected to everybody else in the good ol' days, it really was not fragmented by cliques. I lived it... and this show is a documentary, like all shows. The main diff with My So-Called Life is the voice-over narration from the moody introspective protag girl, kind of like blending 90210 with The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
Anyway... if you never bothered watching 90210 cuz you assumed it was just going to be, I dunno, whatever you assumed -- it's not, it's like My So-Called Life, and made by the same production company, Propaganda Films, who only made a few TV series, but WHAT A FEW -- Twin Peaks, 90210, and My So-Called Life! ^_^
I'm going to post so much red meat about boy-girl friendships, and wade into the gender war slop discourse for a change -- only cuz I'm being vividly reminded of how different social relations were, in general but also between the sexes, back in the good ol' days, after watching 90210 and looking forward to yet another rewatch of My So-Called Life.
ReplyDeleteIt's so crazy how all the gender-slop is always written about "men" and "women" -- when they really mean "Millennial men" and "Millenial women", and maybe Zoomers to a lesser extent. And all the lazy retarded slop about genetic programming / imperative, evolution, Darwin, natural selection, mating strategies, etc. When they're really talking about Millennials and maybe Zoomers in the American Empire during the 21st century.
Thing were very different right here in the American Empire, as recently as the '80s and half of the '90s (I'll round up and just say the late 20th century).
Sorry, dork, your 21st-century deviance and shithole society is not explained by Darwinian natural selection, it's due to hyper-competitive social relations in a harmony vs. discord cycle, not to mention now imperial collapse in the imperial lifespan cycle.
But I'm not going to bother "debunking" the gender war slop -- that speaks for itself. I mean, using it to memorialize the good ol' days ('80s and '90s), when relations were the opposite of how they are in the 21st century.
There's no more surefire way to spray dummy-repellant than to wax nostalgic about boy-girl friendships, and friend groups that were not reducible to "the boy members are dating the girl members", that existed before anyone was dating anyone, and would outlast their dating relationships, although of course temporarily involving some members dating each other -- and several dating outside of the friend group.
Friendship and dating/mating were independent things. They might coincide, they might not coincide.
Mainly the goal is to vaporize all this Millennial bullshit that is the bulk of the gender war slop discourse, in the hopes that it will somehow reach Gen Alpha or later gens, or maybe the Zoomers who are reachable (IDK how big a fraction that is, but Millennials are hopeless).
Gen Alpha will figure this out, and change their minds and hearts away from Millennial norms, on their own. They don't need me to advise them -- but just to set the record straight, and give them some role models from the good ol' days to look up to for "I'm not crazy" validation...
But before that discursive red meat, I need some literal red meat -- shredded lamb shank and ground beef stew, with some mixed vegetables and salsa (and salt, pepper, and garlic). Pretty easy, and turned out great! I *finally* found lamb on sale, it's never on sale. I really missed it, with all this insane inflation that the elites will eventually pay for with their lives...
Timely reminder that a vintage crock-pot from the thrift store is one of the best investments you can make, and they're everywhere, for cheap. Just make sure the crock is removable! ^_^
ReplyDeleteHow audible and tactile the check-out counter used to be! A quick video of the Barnes & Noble check-out in 1997:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lMSOfmFQ-4
I was really thrown for a sensory loop there! Just count how many disinctive sounds there are during a single transaction, which are no longer there, and have not been replaced by any new sounds...
The clicky keys on the keyboard, the crinkle of the paper money, the sliding of the coins against the metal interior of the cash register, the jangle of the coins against each other, the rolling-and-clicking-shut of the cash register drawer, the metal clasp closing on the coin purse section of a wallet, the dot matrix printer head dashing back and forth across the receipt paper, tearing the paper receipt off of the main paper roll...
If someone used a credit card, the clicking into place of the card within the copier, the metallic sliding chunk-chunk, the tearing off of a carbon copy...
Most people in the comments section were nostalgic for the dot matrix printer, more than anything else. Now it's just the barely-there sounds of a thermal printer, where you only hear the rolling of the paper roll that feeds the receipt out to you, but you don't hear the mechanical production of how the ink gets onto the paper. It just gets quietly spit out, fully formed like some uncanny valley newborn page from a digital device-womb. There's no sense of it having been a tabula rasa, with actively constructed ink applied to it in just the right way.
I don't want receipts to feel like they're newborn babies from a digitized womb. It should feel entirely mechanical and technological, just in an interesting and pleasing sensory way -- like the good ol' dot matrix printer.
Same reason I hate touch-screens, which are attempts to make the machine seem like a person with a sense of pressure-sensitive touch, like you and me. It's not a creature with a sense of touch -- it's a machine. It should feel and behave like a machine, by pressing buttons, turning dials, pulling levers, etc., just in a pleasing and interesting way.
The worst are the talky ones, like the self check-out stations that have pre-recorded voices or even worse, AI-generated voice messages. It should never speak to me -- it's a machine. And I can't speak back to it, or else it needs its fake sense of hearing, and takes 30 seconds to process a simple voice input. Its communication should be entirely textual, or if vocal, it should sound like a Speak 'n Spell from 1983, clearly a machine.
Machines, devices, and gadgets can be pleasing to the senses and fascinating to the mind -- but only when they are entirely technological, not uncanny valley attempts to make machines seem human.
The most ridiculous copes about the dot matrix printer (looking over its Wikipedia article), are that the inkjet and laserjet methods that replaced it, are faster and quieter.
ReplyDeleteOutside of professional, dedicated publishing houses, who cares how fast it is? You can see how "slow" the dot matrix printer was for receipts at the cash register -- it took a few seconds, not 10s of seconds, not minutes, not hours. The inkjet or thermal printer does it in maybe 1.5 seconds instead? BFD, totally not noticeable to anyone involved in the transaction.
Quieter is actually a downgrade, not an upgrade -- everyone misses the pleasing sound of the dot-matrix printer vs. the sensory deprivation of the thermal printer etc.
And what about the costs? They're not even more efficient -- which must take cost differences into account. Dot-matrix printers cost 0.2 cents per page, while laserjet printers are 1 to 10 cents per page, and presumably injket somewhere in between. So laserjet is 5 to 50 times more expensive per page than dot-matrix.
The main upgrade is in quality or resolution of the printed material, and possibility of color -- but color printers have always been rare, outside of pro publishing, so ignore the color factor. If you're printing something that's supposed to look visually pleasing unto itself, like a book, then dot-matrix is a hudge downgrade from moveable type or inkjet or laserjet.
But just take a look at your receipt next time -- it's not high-res book-quality letters. The only razzle-dazzle these new-fangled printers ever use, is printing coupons with graphics and varied font sizes and type-faces -- in other words, ADS. The last thing we want when we're checking out. The receipt that tells us what we ordered, how much it was, etc., still looks like it did 30 years ago. So, no improvement in quality, variety, resolution, etc. Also, no need for it anyway -- it's just a receipt, not a book we're going to spend hours looking over.
The other downside of faster printing methods is that it encourage them to print TOO MUCH information. A receipt in the good ol' dot-matrix days had... IDK, a few dozen characters? The thermal-printed ones today have high dozens or even hundreds of characters, for the exact same order. Way too much info about which store it's from, who the cashier / supervisor is, long-ass names for every item, 17 different messages along the bottom about filling out an online survey, bla bla bla bla bla.
Receipts are meant to be kept for later processing, and it's faster to process less info than more info. Thermal-printed receipts suffer from info-overload, and impede rather than aid later processing, assuming you're not going to just instantly throw it in the trash anyway.
It's just supposed to tell me the key points -- not be an Excel spreadsheet with 1000s of cells worth of irrelevant factoids, not a pointless PowerPoint deck full of tedious and idiotic slides with graphics to boot!
Also, dot-matrix had incredibly LOW operating costs, cuz the ink ribbon lasted forever and was cheap to replace, whereas the ink cartridges of the inkjet method were expensive to replace, could easily dry up / sludge up before they were fully used, or get punctured / spill during rough handling to put them in or take them out. Or get damaged while sitting in storage, and something falls on it, it gets dropped, etc., or again dried out before you even open it. The ink ribbons for dot-matrix had none of these problems.
ReplyDeleteDot-matrix was considered so cutting-edge, futuristic, and sci-fi-tier, that it was used as the name of the C-3PO clone in Spaceballs, played by Joan Rivers. Her name was Dot Matrix.
During the (destined to suck) remake, they can't rename this character after a thermal printer, not only cuz it doesn't make for a good-sounding name, but there's just nothing technological about a thermal printer. There's no machine that takes in raw ingredients, actively processes or assembles them into a final product, and delivers it to you. It's a newborn coming out of a womb, fully formed.
Dot-matrix printers let you hear and see the line-by-line application of ink to the blank page, so you could appreciate the construction of a finished product from raw ingredients. Now *that's* hi-tech -- a printer that operates itself!
To the human mind, thermal printers are not even printers, since we don't perceive the printing process through any sense whatsoever. There's just a fully-printed page inside the device, then it comes out like a newborn baby, and that's it. Yeah, we know that there must be a blank roll of paper inside the device, and a separate ink-storage-thingy, and something telling it how to apply ink to the paper... but it all happens internally, with no perceptible actions, so it doesn't seem very tech-y at all to us.
They're trying to make it seem like "magic" since we can't clearly perceive all the mechanical workings of the process. But we're not fooled, and are not impressed as though it were magic. We know it's still a mechanical process. They're just robbing us of the sensory fascination at how a mechanical device operates, and of the sensory interaction with it -- like pressing buttons, flipping switches, turning dials, pulling levers, etc.
They're trying to de-physicalize these devices, to make our world more closely approximate a computer program in some spergatroid's model of what a "mind" is. It's dystopian tech, rather than the utopian futuristic tech of yesteryear.
Barnes & Noble also dystopianified their physical stores during the 2020s. I was surprised it took them that long, most other places began their heritage-hating iconoclastic destruction of iconic Americana during the 2010s.
ReplyDeleteBut as of a few years ago, say good-bye to the hunter green signage and carpeting, creamy beige walls, serif fonts, author portraits on the walls, warm lighting, paneled / finished ceilings (often with recessed or coffered sections), helpful sings of where things are, dark wood shelves, shelves you can see over, and entire sections of comfy furniture groupings for spending some leisure time in the store.
https://medium.com/patternfly/barnes-noble-youre-breaking-my-ux-heart-9bf0bf58cea
Now the background color for everything is shades of gray, with white type in sans serif, the carpeting is gray, the ceiling is high and exposed with pipes etc running everywhere and looking like it's all covered in ash like a bombed-out shithole, harsh bright fluorescent lights everywhere, no signs to guide you, too many random ugly tables in the way, only a handful of chairs that are placed right against the shelves so you feel like you're an inconvenient obstruction to the other browsers and can't actually enjoy yourself sitting down...
What a total nightmare. Who would want to spend 30 seconds in these anti-places? Let alone 30 minutes? Every public space is so hostile and sensory-depriving in this apocalyptic era of anti-places.
Their corporate owners must be expropriated and RETVRN-ed to their '90s heyday look-and-feel. I don't care if people are just gonna stay indoors all day, every day, for the rest of their lives. These structures must still remain identifiably American in style, not the bleached-out, bombed-out, grayed-out destruction that has ruined all public spaces since the 2010s. If they're destined to be ruins, abandoned by their would-be visitors, so be it -- but they're going to look as close to their thriving state as possible, not deliberately defaced like iconoclasts breaking the noses off of statue art.
Execute the entire corporate board and middle-management of every single Fortune 500 company, for their crimes against American culture. That will not restore America to its glory days -- but grave crimes require grave consequences. They must be punished, regardless of the utilitarian outcome of that punishment.
Packs of feral beasts, or even roving hordes of feral humans, could never inflict so much destruction on public spaces, as the elite woketards have wrought since the 2010s. Wild animals might scratch up some furniture, or shove it around from one place to another. They might rub their antlers along a column and wear part of it off. Knock over some shelves -- but not much.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, they're not anti-social, just feral. They're not hell-bent on erasing all culture, or depriving the senses.
They couldn't rip the entire finished paneling off of the ceiling, change out the warm lighting for fluorescent panopticon harshness, bleach all the colors away into shades of gray, use their claws to file away the serifs on the typeface, or any of the other vaporize-it-all iconoclasm that the parasitic elites have deliberately inflicted on all public spaces, during the past 10 years.
And that is why Americans will accept any cohesive band of warlords who show up to overthrow our domestic parasitic traitor elites, who are already so internally fractured. Illiterate hordes from the jungle would be better protectors and restorers of what American places used to look like in our good ol' days, if we showed them pictures and video.
It takes a vehement, heritage-hating auto-immune disease infecting the entire society, to wipe out, hostil-ify, and sensorily deprive the entire population of its public spaces. No foreign carpet-bombing campaign could ever inflict this much destruction on us -- only the internal parasitic elites of the auto-immune stage of the imperial lifespan, who identify the self as a danger to be neutralized, while waving in hostile outsiders.
We won't care where they come from either -- during the dire straits of imperial collapse, it's first come, first served, for the replacement leadership.
Regarding public spaces and bookstores, hopefully someone with a history of literacy and architecture -- but even jungle savages could better appreciate what we used to have, and work to restore it, while executing and expropriating those responsible for its destruction, than our native leadership today, who are still hell-bent on demolishing what precious little of it that still remains.
Imagine being so Puritanically seething, that even hunter green and creamy beige are just beyond the pale, so to speak, of problematic sensuous indulgence, requiring a crusade against even the sub-neon '90s earth tones of Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, which must be bleached into shades of gray.
ReplyDeleteExecute every "leader" who is responsible, at any degree of removal, for the decision to gray-ify all of America.
"Amazon" referred to Japanese women originally! Well, their ancestors on the Eastern Steppe, before they migrated down into the Japanese islands. I just KNEW it!
ReplyDeleteI always said, since investigating the ancient Steppe cultures, that the Amazons had to be Eastern, not Western, based on who has female warriors, women who ride horses, women who can hit a target with a bow & arrow from a mile away, women who are not relegated to low-ranking roles in their culture, and so on.
Well well well, now I can finally connect them to the most famous linguistic label for the Amazons... "Amazon" itself!
Recall that Herodotus says in the Scythian language, they're called "Oiorpata", which he glosses as "man" and "slay", that is "man-slayers". During my discovery that Scythian is Uralic, specifically from the Mordvinic branch and most like present-day Erzya, I gave a Uralic etymology for that term, based on "man" and "pot / cauldron", that is, "man-cookers" rather than "man-slayers", but close enough.
But that's the Scythian word for them -- where does the Ancient Greek word "Amazon" come from? That word became far more widespread than "Oiorpata", so perhaps it is closer to their original ethnonym.
Nothing much turns up from the various Indo-Euro approaches to the name, a few of which are here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%88%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%B6%CF%8E%CE%BD
The main problem with them is that they treat the word "Amazon" as an epithet -- a descriptive term for the roving bands of women warriors. And the roots for these descriptive terms are drawn from Greek, Indo-Iranian, Caucasian, and other languages which the Amazons themselves did not speak. They were from the Eastern Steppe, so they didn't speak Indo-Euro unless it was Tocharian, but there's no convincing Tocharian etymology.
And Herodotus says the Amazons and the Scythians spoke languages that were totally unintelligible to each other, not just different dialects, or sister languages of the same family. Given that the Scythians spoke Uralic (specifically Mordvinic), we can rule out any other Uralic language as the native tongue of the Amazons.
Well, what else is there in the Eastern Steppe? In the mid-1st millennium and several centuries before? Only Yeniseian -- but as I've shown extensively, Japonic is a sister to Dene-Yeniseian. So perhaps Japonic, Na-Dene, or Yeniseian could supply some roots -- but not Indo-Euro or Caucasian, which is a bit too far to the Western part of the Steppe.
Since everyone is blind to the widespread prevalence of Uralic languages across the Steppe in ancient times, nobody bothered to ask what kind of Uralic etymology there might be for "Amazon". Maybe it's a Scythian word. It's probably not entirely of Scythian origin, that would be an exonym like "Oiorpata". But they may be relaying the endonym of the Amazons, with some extra Scythian packaging.
The main fault of those other theories is that they don't have an ethnonym of any kind, whether it's an endonym or exonym, and they don't have a toponym either (place-name), which refers to where the people come from. They're entirely focused on the fact that they're women -- which is important, but not the main thing -- and that they're unusual compared to most women.
So, my etymology will provide a far more natural solution, since it has both an ethnonym -- an endonym, in fact! -- and a toponymic word, plus an after-thought word relating to women. It's not a description of the Amazons as women who kill men, who live without men, who are the equals of men, etc. It says they're the women from a certain land, which is inhabited by a certain tribe.
OK, I'll cut right to the chase. Ancient Greek "Amazon" renders a Scythian word, since they were the culture in between Greeks and Amazons, who told the Greeks everything about the various cultures of the Steppe, especially the exotic ones to the East.
ReplyDeleteI'll just say Mordvinic instead of Scythian, since that's what branch it belongs to. The Mordvinic word is something like "wa + mastor + ni", and it means "Wa [endonym] + land + woman". That is, a woman from Wa-land, or the land of the Wa people.
This "Wa" is none other than the ancient endonym for the Japanese, before they entered the Japanese islands and later took up the endonym "Yamato", derived from the place-name "Yamatai", which as I explained earlier, is of Emishi / Ainu origin, and means "chestnut + father", alluding to the land around Nara, where the early Yamato state was centered, being rich in chestnuts, a father or provider of chestnuts, which remain an iconic staple food of the Japanese to this day.
"Wa" is *not* of Chinese origin, although they did record it and relay it to others. "Wa" is the 1st-person plural pronoun in Japonic, like "we" in English, and is a natural endonym -- "we" as opposed to "they". They were using this endonym when they were still living on the Eastern Steppe, long before they ventured down into the Japanese islands.
"Mastor" means "earth / land, country / state" in both branches of Mordvinic, Erzya and Moksha. This word can take ethnonym prefixes, like "Eŕźa + mas(tor)" ("land of the Erzya"), to refer to land of the people named by the ethonym. It can also take suffix nouns, like "mastor + be", where "be" = "edge", that is "edge of the world".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80
"Ni" means "woman, wife" in Erzya, and reflects P-M "ńij", which is inherited from P-Uralic "niŋä" = "woman, female".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BD%D0%B8#Erzya
Alternatively, the "woman, wife" word is from Finno-Ugric "naje", which does not have an attested reflex in Mordvinic, but it does in Finnic, Sami, and Ugric, so perhaps it used to be in nearby Mordvinic circa 1000 BC but has since been replaced. It would've been something like "nai", whose main phonetic difference from "ni" above is the diphthong "ai" instead of just "i". This isn't very important, just noting another possibility.
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=583
Now, how does Mordvinic "wamastorni" become Greek "amazon"? Well, the earliest use of "Amazon" is in Homer, and by that time Greek had dropped initial "w", which continued through the next big mention of them, in Herodotus, and was cemented from that point on.
ReplyDeleteThat leaves "amastorni".
I think the Greeks analyzed the final "i" as a plural suffix, on analogy with their own plural suffixes, which ended in "i". If the Mordvinic word for "woman" was "nai" instead of "ni", that is even more tempting, since "-ai" in Greek is the feminine plural suffix in the nominative case, or dictionary case. The Scythians were using the compound word in the singular, "Wa-land woman", but the Greeks heard it in the plural, since the semantic difference is negligible when you're asking about "who are those people?" You could refer to one of them, in the singular (as in "wamastorni"), or in the plural, as the Greeks heard it. That's inflectional only, and easy to mistake.
So the Greeks deleted the final "i" (or "ai") to get what they thought was the singular form, "amastorn".
But Greek doesn't allow final consonant clusters. Final consonants can only be "n", "r", or "s", and by far the most common is "n", especially for nouns. And it's the closest to the edge of the word anyway, so the "r" was deleted to simplify the cluster, leaving:
"amaston"
In Ancient Greek, the letter "ζ", which we transcribe as "z" in Roman letters, was originally a sequence of 2 consonants, "sd", not "z". Later the "s" absorbed the voicing of "d" to yield "zd", and perhaps later after that, was metathesized to "dz". So, really the phonetic target of the Greek word is "amasdon".
Well, we're just about there already -- we only have to explain why the "t" of "amaston" was voiced to "d", matching the Greek target "amasdon" perfectly. I think this was under the influence of the lost "r" from the cluster -- it's voiced, in the same coronal position, so its voicing was preserved on the preceding coronal consonant "t", which then became "d".
This could have been reinforced by the exotic connotation of the Amazons as a legendary culture from the mysterious Eastern Steppe. They couldn't have had a simple, quotidian consonant sequence like "st" -- they're an exotic culture, therefore their ethonym must have been phonetically exotic as well, so make that sequence "sd" instead.
And there you have it -- from Mordvinic "wamastorn(a)i" to Greek "amasdon", QED. ^_^
The beauty of this solution is that it uses ethonyms -- an *endonym*, in fact -- and toponymic words, and a generic "woman / wife" word, instead of trying to construct an epithet that doesn't relate to where they're from or what they call themselves.
ReplyDeleteThis solution is the only one so far to do that.
Even better, it identifies who the linguistic intermediaries were between the Amazons and the Greeks -- not Iranians, who lived down in Iran by Homer's time, not on the Steppe, not the Greeks themselves, and not Caucasians, who are too far to the West to know about Amazons.
Rather, this points to the Scythians as the intermediaries, and that is indeed who Herodotus links the Amazons with. Although they could not understand each other's language, they still decided to mate with each other, and their offspring were the Sauromatians, later known as Sarmatians, who lived further to the East than the Scythians -- their home turf was between the home turfs of their parents, the Scythians to the West, and the Amazons to the East.
Unlike other Uralic languages, only Mordvinic has a word for "earth / land, country" that has "-to-" after "mas". According to Wiktionary, the "mas" element is of P-Uralic origin, while the "-stor" element may have been borrowed from an Indo-Euro language. That's possible, since Mordvinic is the most Southwestern branch of Uralic, putting it closest to the P-IE urheimat, and in contact with P-Indo-Iranian as it made its eastward trek across the Steppe.
The "st" sequence is crucial, since that's what's needed for the Greek "ζ", which was originally "sd", only a minor alteration of "st".
That's perfect -- I didn't choose Mordvinic cuz it was the only Uralic language that has "st" in its word for "earth / land, country", but cuz that's what Scythian was, and Scythians must have been the intermediaries between legends of the Amazons and the Greek audience. The fact that "st" or "sd" appears in the name "Amazon" is an independent confirmation that Scythian, AKA Mordvinic, was the intermediary language, not some other nearby Uralic language.
Who else might the name have referred to? Well, anyone whose ethnonym -- whether exonym or endonym -- began with a consonant that was dropped word-initially in Ancient Greek by Homer's time, whose nuclear vowel was "a", and maaaaybe a final nasal consonant, which could have been merged into the "m" of "mastor".
ReplyDeleteIt's not "y", since Greek preferred rendering that "ya" as "ia" instead of dropping it altogether for "a".
The only other consonant that Ancient Greek dropped initially was "h", so if there was a group named "Ha" or "Han", that would work. I know, the core of the Chinese are called "Han", but they're way too far down into Southeast Asia to have been known to the Ancient Greeks or probably the Scythians either, and they were sedentary agrarians, not nomadic horse pastoralist archers.
"Hun" / "Xiongnu" / etc. does not work, cuz the nuclear vowel is all wrong -- in all its variants, it's "o" or "u", a back rounded high(-ish) vowel, whereas the first vowel of "Amazon" is unrounded, central or front, and as low as you can go.
I'm open to other suggestions that would fit phonetically, but only if they are also plausible ethnographically -- known to have inhabited the Eastern Steppe during the 1st millennium BC, a horse-taming and horse-riding culture, with women warriors or at least women playing powerful roles of some sort, and so on.
As a reminder, to summarize the case for the Japanese and Wa having originated in the Eastern Steppe, their creation of land myth is identical to cultures from Northwest Mongolia, where the creator god uses his staff to stir the primordial oily ocean water, whose oily foam coagulates into land masses on the water's surface. These people from NW Mongolia spoke Turkic or Mongolic languages by the time they were visited by the Russian explorer Potanin, but in the 1st millennium BC, Turkic and Mongolic did not exist. They would've spoken Uralic or more likely given their affinity with the Japanese, something from the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family.
Since creation myths are shibboleths that do not easily change, regardless of other cultural changes like switching languages, this puts the ancestors of the Japanese near NW Mongolia before they entered Korea and Japan during the late 1st millennium BC.
Generally the direction of the headwinds around the world is east-to-west, so even though the Wa eventually trekked eastward into Japan, when they were hanging out in their original Eastern Steppe homeland, they very well may have forayed westward across the Steppe.
How far? Well, close enough to interact with the Scythians, who were in the Western Steppe, so possibly the Wa ventured into the Central Steppe. But the Steppe is one great big single place, it's no big deal to go from one end to the other -- assuming you're moving *with* the headwinds, not *against* them. And as an Eastern culture, the Wa would have enjoyed those westward headwinds, and could have ventured all the way into present-day Hungary, if they felt like it.
Nobody mentions them advancing that far, so perhaps they were just comfortable roaming into the Central Steppe, where they a group who they found exotic -- light-skinned, dark-haired, round-eyed, sharp-faced Scythians. And the Wa would have been not too different-looking themselves, only having a slight epicanthic fold and black hair. Just exotic enough, in both directions -- they could not resist each other, one nomadic group respecting another, and they fell in love... for a time at least, before the Wa women returned to their man-free lifestyle.
Well, what did the Scythian dudes expect from biker-gang baddies, other than receiving the "love 'em and leave 'em" treatment? Wild nomadic baddies can't be tamed, any more than their horses can be...
Yeah, but wasn't it worth it? To be chosen as the only group of men on Earth who the Amazons were burning with desire to mate with? That alone would establish your undying fame for the rest of all time... ^_^
And so, yet again, we see how Uralic languages are the skeleton key to unlocking so many mysteries of the ancient world at or north of the Steppe. Even when they served as intermediaries, which unlocks mysteries even further into the mysterious East!
ReplyDeleteImagine being ignorant of Uralic -- you'd totally miss out on the origins of this Steppe version of Romeo and Juliet! ^_^
I dedicate this little piece of scholarship to 3 Hololive girls who embody the Amazon ideal:
ReplyDeleteMarine, a master at Touhou bullet hell shoot 'em up video games, and whose character is a female pirate captain.
Aqua, a natural at first-person shooter games -- and all sorts of other games, for that matter.
Okayu, another first-rate gamer girl who immediately mastered the horse archery mini-game in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, as if she were still living in the Altai-Sayan Mountains.
Being able to shoot a projectile and hit a moving target, while being in motion yourself, is a skill that only comes from having ancestors who were horse-riding archers. And contrary to Western images of "women warriors" as big hulking muscular manly sword-wielders, riding a horse and shooting arrows from a bow is something that women can do as well, since it's off-loading some of the strength and stamina to the horse and to the potential energy of the bow.
The Eastern version of "women warriors" -- or "gamer girls" in the modern era -- allows them to maintain a lot of their femininity, or "womanly charm", as Marine is fond of calling it. ^_^
The Scythians were not willing to mate outside their group with a bunch of hulking steroided man-women -- but cuz the Amazons were women warriors who were still very kawaii and womanly. ^_^
Why did Scythians include the toponym morpheme "mastor", when they could have simply used the morphemes for "Wa" and "ni" to mean "Wa woman"? Well, phonetically that would make "wani" or "wanai", and that is not so morphologically transparent -- it looks almost like an atomic morpheme in Uralic, which is of shape CVCCV. You can't tell it's a compound.
ReplyDeleteWhereas when you insert the morpheme for "land, country", it's very clearly a compound. And since it's generic and used in many different compounds, it tells you right away that the morpheme before it, "wa", must be some kind of ethnonym, or other modifier for what kind of land or country it is. "Land / country of the Wa".
That's the morpho-phonological reason. But there could be a semantic reason as well -- to broaden the scope of which tribes are referred to. If you say "Wa woman", that means she must be from that very tribe itself. Whereas "Wa-land woman" or "Wa-country woman" means a woman from the land / country where the Wa are the dominant, central, or majority tribe -- but not necessarily the only tribe. The Wa gave their name to the broad territory under their control, but on the Steppe there are all sorts of other ethnic groups roaming around as part of a confederation.
So, perhaps the Scythians didn't know which micro-ethnicity of the Eastern Steppe the Amazons belonged to -- but they *did* know that they were from "Wa-land", y'know, that broad territory over there, where the Wa are the main ethnicity. They could be from some non-Wa group, what do we know? But they're from that territory, at any rate.
Japanese uses a toponym derived from "English" to refer to all of the British Isles, including Wales, Scotland, and even Ireland -- "igirisu", from Portuguess "ingles", in turn from "English" in English. (The Portuguese were among the first Westerners to contact the Japanese.) So they could refer to a Scotsman, Welshman, or Irishman as "igirisu-jin", where "jin" = "person".
Something similar could have happened with the Amazons. The Scythian intermediaries knew that the Amazons came from "Wa-land", and passed this "Wa" ethnonym along to the Greeks (who obligatorily deleted the "w"). Maybe the Amazons were Wa, or non-Wa, but they came from "Wa-land" in either case, like Scots, Welsh, and Irish coming from "igirisu", along with the good ol' English themselves, in the minds of Japanese speakers.
Odysseus' name is Crescentine, meaning "wanderer", confirmed by Pre-Uralic substrate in Finno-Volga-land. Well, this is rather timely, but this mystery would have called upon me to solve it, no matter what movies are out right now, since I'm knee-deep in Crescentine languages and culture.
ReplyDeleteHis name is not Indo-Euro but part of the Pre-Greek substrate. There is quite a bit of variation in his name. The 1st consonant is found as "d" or "l", and the 2nd consonant as "s", "ss", "x", or "tt". The initial vowel also shows up as "u" in Etruscan and Latin, not to mention Greek variants beginning with "ou", instead of "o".
Beekes reconstructs the name as "Od/lukʲeu", with a palatalized "k", and leaving the 1st consonant open.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%88%CE%B4%CF%85%CF%83%CF%83%CE%B5%CF%8D%CF%82
First, we can put aside the "-eus", which is a standard name ending for Pre-Greek figures -- Perseus, Prometheus, Theseus, etc. Greek prefers "-os", a la Proto-Indo-European, so "-us", let alone "-eus", is a marker of a Pre-Greek origin.
I don't think the initial vowel is prothetic, i.e. not original and inserted to ease pronunciation. There's no awkward consonant cluster after the 1st vowel. And Crescentine languages were fine with vowels at the beginning of words, unlike Indo-Euro.
However, it can't be "o" since Pre-Greek is Crescentine, which did not have "o". So it must have been "u", as in the Etruscan version (from another Crescentine language). Maybe Greek lowered it to "o" to make it sound more Indo-Euro, or under the influence of similar-sounding Greek words of I-E origin, which were then used to give folk etymologies, such as "odússomai" = "to hate".
That makes the root of his name "udukʲ" or "ulukʲ", which sounds positively Sumerian, so we're on the right track.
Although the Pre-Greek scholars can tell this name is not Indo-Euro, they can't tell what it means, since evidently there are no other Pre-Greek words that look similar enough to this name, to hint at its meaning.
And that's where the good ol' Pre-Uralic substrate of Finno-Volga-land comes in. This substrate is also Crescentine, reflecting the spread of Anatolian agriculture into the Balkans and up into Finno-Volga-land, during the Copper Age, as in the Cucuteni culture and others like it. Their language was probably ancestral to or related closely to Hattic, from Anatolia.
ReplyDeleteWhen these Crescentine words were adopted into the Uralic successor languages, they were subjected to Uralic phonotactics, whose preferred syllable shape for a word is CVCCV. Uralic does not like 2 non-initial consonants separated by a vowel, as in "uduk" or "uluk". I'm also ignoring the palatalization on the "k" -- there was no such separate "k" in Uralic, so it would have been adopted as a plain "k". Maybe it was incorporated into the following vowel as "e" or "i", but that's not so important.
Rather, the vowel between the 2 non-initial consonants would've been deleted to give it that oh-so-Uralic medial consonant sequence -- "udkV" or "ulkV", where "V" is some vowel.
Well well well, whaddaya know? There's exactly that word in the substrate of F-V-land, "ulkɜ" (where "ɜ" is another way of saying "any vowel"). It has to do with "far, farther out, distant, outside, exterior", and even "wide, far and wide" in Komi. It includes verbs as well, like "to move farther out".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1662
With the standard "-eus" name ending, I take his whole name to mean, "the one who is far, who goes farther out, who is distant, who is an outsider, who goes far and wide" -- in short, a "wanderer" far from home, with a connotation of "outcast / outsider", which is also apropos for Odysseus.
But wait, there's more! I have an explanation for the uncertainty in the "d" vs. "l" in his Pre-Greek name. I don't think these reflect a single shared form, but confusion over what his name meant, given the presence of a near-homophone with another plausible meaning for him.
That shows up as "urke" in the F-V substrate, which means "to escape, to be set free, to leave, to flee, to set off".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1667
Semantically, this is very much like Odysseus' character trait of being an escape artist, wily and cunning and full of skills and tricks to escape the various traps set for him, not to mention escaping from one land to another on the way back home. And there's also a connotation of "to set off" -- a more deliberate, willful, "charting a course" kind of escaoe, not merely reactive and fleeing like a coward.
Phonetically, this is the same as the one above, except with "r" in place of "l" -- both liquids. But unlike "l", "r" has central airflow, and in its tap form, has a discrete manner like "d" or "t", whereas "l" can be held indefinitely. Crescentine did not have "d", but it did have "t" and "r". Etruscan has "t" in this place, so the other Crescentine point of triangulation isn't much help.
Maybe the "r"-variant of this root was really "rt" or "tr", simplified to "t" in Etruscan, "r" in the F-V substrate, and "d" in Greek.
On the other hand, perhaps it was "r" all along, as in the F-V form. Greek did not like the "r"-variant sounding too close to the "l"-variant, so it dissimilated the liquids and hardened "r" into "d" to make them more distinctive. Then Etruscan borrowed from a Greek "d"-variant, rendered as "t" since Etruscan doesn't have voiced obstruents.
Which of these two near-homophones with highly plausible descriptions of Odysseus' character are original? Both are plausible Bronze or Copper Age descriptions -- they involve his external behavior, not his internal mental states (which is another mark against the theory of "odussomai" = "hateful").
ReplyDeleteSemantically, the over-arching narrative is about him being a wanderer, though, and his escape artist tricks are just plot devices to get from one place to the next, on the way home. Fundamentally, he is more of an archetypal wanderer, than an archetypal escape artist. Being a successful wanderer implies that you're something of a wily, cunning escape artist -- but being a wily, cunning escape artist doesn't imply that you're a wanderer, you could be getting out of all sorts of jams locally.
Phonetically, the earliest attested form is with "l" rather than "d". And given the links to the F-V substrate words, which contrast "l" and "r", that suggests "l" was primary and left unchanged, whereas "r" was a later development, and subjected to a slight alteration, hardening into "d" in Greek. An "l" can be hardened into "d" as well, and "r" kept unchanged -- but that was not the choice the Greeks made. So, they must have viewed the "l"-variant as the original, and arrived at the "d"-variant by some sound change.
Well, Crescentine does not even have "d", so that's another clue that it's not the original one. Still, if it were originally "rt" or "tr", that could've been adopted as "d" in Greek.
On the whole, it looks like the "l" variant is original -- a far-and-wide wanderer distant from home -- and the "r" / "d" variant was phonetically similar and semantically tempting -- an escape artist -- so it entered circulation as well, afterward.
The Greeks couldn't make heads or tails of the semantic distinctions between the two Crescentine variants, so they adopted them phonetically but not semantically. As far as they knew, they were just two different pronunciations for the same descriptive term of the hero, whatever it may have meant.
But the F-V substrate reveals that the phonetic variants were likely semantically distinct as well, and that's how 2 separate variants remained in circulation. Also, which one was likely the original one -- "ulukyeu" = "the wanderer".
^_^
BTW, there's another word "ulke" in Finno-Ugric, but it means "post", nothing to do with distant, outside, far-and-wide, etc. This is of native origin, not the substrate in F-V-land, which is Crescentine.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1090
So that F-V word about "distant, outside, far-and-wide, etc." must be Crescentine in origin -- since the native F-U or Uralic root that it matches phonetically, means something entirely irrelevant, "post".
I always say that ignorance of Uralic is ignorance of Northern Europe as a whole -- well, now we're seeing how ignorant you will be of the Mediterranean as well, since the F-V substrate is by far the best repository of Crescentine vocabulary.
While ignoring Uralic, you could still figure out that Odysseus is not an Indo-Euro word -- but you wouldn't know what it meant. The substrate in Finno-Volga-land can confirm that it's not Indo-Euro, rather Crescentine -- but it can also tell you what it means! "Wanderer", with a later near-homophone meaning "escape artist".
And of course, Uralic was spoken all across the Steppe in the 1st millennium BC, so you'll remain ignorant of the Steppe if you don't know anything about Uralic. You might hallucinate Iranians in Ukraine, for instance, instead of Mordvinic speakers, who still live nearby and still speak Mordvinic to this day.
About that "d"-variant, and what it could've looked like phonetically, and meant semantically, in Crescentine, let's consult Hattic, which is sparsely attested, but may have an answer still.
ReplyDeleteCrescentine languages are agglutinative, but not subject to Uralic phonotactics... and yet, it's common to see them reduce and delete unstressed vowels, much like Uralic anyway.
We're looking for something like "uruk" that could mean "to set off, to be set free, to escape, to flee".
In Hattic, "ure / uri" means "strong, forceful, vigorous", and "tuk" means "to step". Hattic is a prefixing language, so "ure + tuk" would mean "to step strongly / forcefully". The 1st vowel is stressed, later vowels are subject to reduction and deletion, leading to "urtuk".
This semantically overlaps what "urke" means in the F-V substrate -- "to set off" and "to be set free, escape, flee" in a deliberate forceful vigorous way.
Phonetically, there are too many non-initial consonants, which must be condensed into a 2-C medial sequence. The "k" is distinct from the "rt", so it stays. IDK why the "r" is retained instead of "t" from the "rt" cluster, but it is, and the 2nd "u" is deleted to put the 2 C's in contact with each other, "urke".
Greek doesn't have the preferred syllable shape CVCCV, so it is fine with the 1st and 2nd "u"s remaining where they are, and with the "k" staying. Aware of the "l"-variant, "uluk", it expects a single consonant between the 2 "u"s, though, and simplifies "rt" into "d", preserving the alveolar stop of "t" but also the voicing of "r". It may also want to dissimilate the liquids "r" and "l". That makes it "uduk", QED.
Myrina, Amazon queen mentioned in the Iliad, has Eastern name, probably "horse" with (Greek) feminine name suffix. Mixing the topics of Homeric epics, Amazonian baddies, and Eastern languages and cultural practices, there's an Amazon queen named "Myrina" in Ancient Greek mythology.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrina_(mythology)
The earliest reference to *anyone* by that name is in the Iliad, where she has a burial mound in the region around Troy, and is given the epithet "swift-bounding" -- like a horse, gazelle, etc.
There's a later legend about a Libyan Amazon queen, who commanded an army with cavalry units, by the same name, according to Diodorus Siculus. Since Homer doesn't say anything about her adventuring through North Africa, the Levant, etc., this is probably a later addition that used her name, since "Myrina" had already been popularized in the Iliad as the name of an Amazon queen who was so prestigious that she received a burial mound that future warriors would visit during the Trojan War.
Putting the Libyan figure aside, the earliest one was buried near Troy. But her name does not have a Greek etymology, and AFAICT, nobody has bothered coming up with an explanation for her name in any language, whether Indo-Euro or otherwise. Ugh -- just, like, men, to totally ignooorrrre women, even when they're so famous in battle that male warriors themselves paid their respects to her. Sexist much? Jeez...
But feminazis do occasionally make a good point -- she's hardly a marginal figure, why no obsession with coming up with an etymology for her name? Well, I love Amazonian baddies, so just leave this entire job up to me... ^_^
Since there's no obvious Greek origin to her name, and since she's from the Heroic Age or earlier, there's no way her name is even Indo-Euro.
Phonetically, it's possible her name is Crescentine, since it lacks "o", no voiced obstruents, and Etruscan uses a patronymic suffix "-na" -- in this case, "descendant of Muri", whoever "Muri" is supposed to be. I kinda doubt that, since they'd have to explain who Muri is, in order for the patronymic to pack a punch. Without explaining who her male ancestor "Muri" is, who cares if she is his descendant?
But ethnographically, I don't think so -- Amazons were Easterners, not from West Eurasia, which is where Crescentine languages were spoken.
I don't think it's Uralic either, since only a handful of them were famed as horse-mounted archer types, and not necessarily ones with female warriors. Also, phonetically, CVCVCV is not the best Uralic word shape, which wants to be CVCCV, perhaps with other suffixes. There's no consonant sequence in "Myrina", so it's probably not Uralic either.
But speaking of "Amazon" being a Mordvinic word that meant "Wa-land woman", why not explore some Eastern languages? We've already ruled out Uralic, including Samoyedic.
ReplyDeleteTurkic did not exist that far back, and in any case, Proto-Turkic bans nasals word-initially, so "Myrina" cannot be Turkic.
Very few Proto-Mongolic words begin with "m" either, although several begin with "n". Proto-Tungusic is fine with both "m" and "n" initially.
Proto-Japonic is fine with both "m" and "n" initially.
However, Yeniseian bans initial nasals, and passed this shibboleth onto Proto-Turkic, which is some kind of creole between Yeniseian and Uralic, which formed in the 1st millennium AD.
Neither Mongolic, Tungusic, or Japonic insists on medial consonant sequences like Uralic, in fact P-J bans consonant sequences. Mongolic and Tungusic are fine with coda consonants, though.
Mongolic or even Para-Mongolic, as well as Tungusic, are like Turkic in being "young" language families, probably from the 1st millennium AD, or maybe a bit before. But probably not so far back as the 2nd millennium BC, when the Trojan War takes place.
Still, the best bet is some kind of Eastern Steppe language.
OK, now to the answer -- her name means "horse" in some Eastern Steppe language, phonetically "murin", and was given a Greek feminine name suffix "-a" to make her name sound recognizably feminine to Greek audiences. After all, Amazons defy the typical gender norm, so Greek audiences might not know if "Myrin" had a man's name as well as a man's role as a warrior. Or a gender-neutral name. Well, Greek made it clear she was feminine, and stuck "-a" onto the end of her name.
ReplyDeleteOne of the classic wanderworts of East Asia is the word for "horse", which begins with "m" and comes in several variants. One of them has "r" after the 1st vowel, and it's possible that was loaned into the Western Steppe, where it appeared as the source of English "mare".
But in the East, the 1st vowel is either "o" or "u", and "in" follows "r" in both cases. There's Proto-Tungusic "murin", an exact phonetic match to the name "Myrina" (apart from the tacked-on Greek feminine name suffix "-a"). And closely related is Proto-Mongolic "morïn", and the Para-Mongolic Khitan word "mori".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Tungusic/murin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Mongolic/mor%C3%AFn
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%98%B2%9C%F0%98%B0%A3#Khitan
Koreanic and Japonic are slightly different, where both have "a" after "m", and Koreanic has its sole liquid consonant afterward, while Japonic does not since it bans coda consonants. It's "mal" in Koreanic, and "uma" in Japonic, with unexplained "u" before "ma".
Regardless of which particular language donated this word to the name "Myrina", it was likely a wanderwort in the region anyway. Tungusic provides the best match, since it has every single segment matching the root of "Myrina", and Tungusic has tons of words with initial "m". Mongolic has a slightly different 1st vowel (lowered to "o"), and its native roots do not like initial "m". This word "morïn" is 1 of only 3 listed at Wiktionary, and it could be a loan, vs. 9 beginning with "n".
The point is, this is not just a slightly Eastern word -- it's a pretty *damn* Eastern word, where the best match is further east than Mongolia, from Manchuria to the Pacific coast.
This is the region where horses were first domesticated and utilized by humans, however much Western copers want to split hairs about "taming wild animals" vs. "selectively breeding in captivity". Unlike the West, there is greater diversity of equine species in the East, including some that are still totally wild, whereas wile equines went extinct in the West.
Being named after the name of an animal species is hardly rare -- witness all the variations on "wolf" in Germanic names, "lion" in Greek, and so on. Especially in the heartland of horse domestication, a horse-riding nomad warrior queen could easily have been named "horse" in her own language.
All that the Greek story-tellers added was a Greek feminine suffix, just to drive home that point to their Greek audience that she wasn't a hulking roided-out man-woman, but a kawaii cutie, whose horse and bow allowed her to off-load the demand for strength, and let her keep her womanly shape and personality. ^_^
Homer likens Myrina to a horse by describing her as "polyskarthmos", where "skarthmos" means "skipping", "bounding", etc., and is used by Homer in the same work to describe the literal horses pulling Poseidon's chariot as "euskarthmos".
ReplyDeleteThe only difference is the modifiers "eu-" vs. "poly-". The former means "well, beautifully, etc." whereas the latter means "many, much, a lot". So perhaps he was likening her to a horse that bounded and bounded and bounded some more, she couldn't be stopped or tamed. Or maybe he was likening her to an entire team of horses, that's how much bounding there was.
Mmmm... so much bounding that she was a one-woman team of wild horses, what a baddie. But then, we expect no less from a literal Amazon queen. ^_^
Final thought: Myrina is one of the earliest examples of Eastern horse-riding warrior culture being recorded in the West. It's a very easy trip to make, given the westward-blowing headwinds, and Easterners have been making Westerners eat shit on a regular basis since pre-history, using horses and bows & arrows.
ReplyDeleteThe earliest archaeological evidence for this timeless phenomenon is the abandonment of the Western Steppe by locals, who fled northward and westward, into NE Europe and Scandinavia, just after 3000 BC. This is the Corded Ware culture, from Yamnaya-like people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture
Notice that the map lies north of the Steppe -- they had to high-tail it out of there, for some odd reason. Well, it was not so odd at all -- the only reason people from that part of the world abandon the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, fleeing westward and northward, is due to a sudden influx of Eastern Steppe horse-riding nomadic archers, who tear through their settlements like biker gangs doing drive-by shootings en masse.
Sometimes the bikers come all the way over in one fell swoop, like the Huns, sometimes there's a chain reaction of westward-migrating biker gangs that set off a domino sequence that terminates in the East European Plain.
Herodotus says that the Scythians were part of just such a westward domino effect, having been displaced by fellow Easterners who were even further to their east, and then displacing the local Cimmerians of the Northern Black Sea region, who fled westward. The Cimmerians were probably Indo-Euro, whereas the Scythian invaders were Uralic, just like the Magyars of the following millennium.
The Indo-Euro refugees under such scenarios did not spread their language, since Scandinavia spoke either some Pre-Uralic Scandi-specific language, or Uralic, up until the 1st millennium AD, when North Germanic split off from the Germanic branch of Indo-Euro.
We can tell they did not speak Indo-Euro before the arrival of Uralic, cuz there's no Indo-Euro substrate in the Finnic or Sami or Permic languages. There's a local Scandi-specific substrate, reflecting the hunter-gatherers of the extreme north. There's the Crescentine substrate of Finno-Volga-land, reflecting the early agriculturalists. But there's no Indo-Euro substrate, reflecting the Corded Ware refugees from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.
Being a refugee means you usually adapt to your gracious hosts' language, or maybe remain bilingual -- but your hosts will *not* be adopting your language, anymore than Americans speak anything other than English, despite the dozens or hundreds of refugee / diaspora languages spoken here for several generations or even over a century in the case of Cantonese.
Whoever spread the Indo-Euro languages first into the Mediterranean and Caucasus, were not refugees -- they must have been elite, influencers, or other kind of role model. Not everyone is the same from their culture, for all time. Elite specialists in high demand may be deferred to, and their language adopted by locals -- while lowly desperate refugees will be tolerated, but not mimicked culturally, even if they are incorporated into the local genepool.
And that is why, despite Scandinavians having the highest levels of Yamnaya-like DNA in Europe, they are some of the youngest speakers of Indo-European languages, and that language conversion did not correlate with the introduction of Western Steppe DNA into their genepool, which happened 3000 years earlier, during the Corded Ware era, which left no I-E substrate in the later Uralic languages that encompassed Scandinavia.
The westward-dominating horse-riders from the Eastern Steppe didn't always stop at the Danube River either. The Huns fought the Byzantines in Thrace, the Bulgars poured straight down through Thrace and harassed the Byzantines right in Constantinople, and to judge from the legends of Myrina -- who lived so long ago that she was already from a distant heroic era in the eyes of the Trojan War soldiers -- those who displaced the Yamnaya-like types up into NE Europe probably crossed the Danube down into Thrace and NW Anatolia, where Myrina's burial mound is located, somewhere near Troy.
ReplyDeleteIt seems impossible to us Westerners, since the headwinds blow entirely against us -- but for Easterners, it's no more than a typical road trip to open the gates of the Altai-Sayan Mountains, and wind up shortly in Thrace. Especially when you have a cohesive team of people with you, which any expanding group always does.
The name of the Eastern Steppe tribal confederation who displaced the Yamnaya-like people up into the Corded Ware region, did not leave their name to history. But after putting these pieces together, I propose the name "Myrinians", after their perhaps not-so-mythical Amazon queen. If that name was legendary enough for Homer, it's legendary enough for us! ^_^
Amazon "Kyme" had Eastern name, from Yeniseian word for "silver". Myrina was not the only Amazon to have a city in NW Anatolia named after her in antiquity -- so did Kyme (usually transcribed as Cyme), who was later said to be one of Myrina's companions in battle.
ReplyDeleteThe only guess at the meaning of the city's name is that it's related to Greek "kyma" = "wave", and although it is a coastal city, it doesn't have distinctive waves... every coastal city sees waves in that part of the world. As with Myrina, it sounds like it's not Greek, and therefore probably not Indo-Euro at all.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CE%BC%CE%B7
Pursuing the same framework as before -- that Amazons are Easterners, and so should their names be -- I dug around until I found a very fitting origin for her name in an Eastern Steppe language. It's originally "xum" (velar fricative, not "ks"), from Proto-Yeniseian, and meaning "silver". It was borrowed into Proto-Turkic as "kümüĺ", and into Sino-Tibetan languages further east. Clearly an Eastern word, but which got around as a result of nomadic Steppe confederations who spoke Yeniseian, like the Xiongnu.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/xum
Perhaps through an intermediary, or in Greek itself, the "x" was hardened into "k", since there are no velar fricatives in Greek. The "u" and "m" are fine, and an Indo-Euro feminine name suffix "-e" was tacked on to make her name sound more recognizably feminine to Greek audiences, just like "Murin" having "-a" tacked on to give "Myrina". Why not the more common suffix "-a"? That would've created a homophone with "kyma" = "wave", so use the less common but still feminine name ending "-e" instead.
Phonetically, it's straightforward -- but semantically, why would her name or the city name have to do with silver?
All sorts of languages derive names from their word for silver, like the surname "Argento" in Italy, the given names "Gin" and "Ginjiro" in Japan (and Hololive's Noel, whose epithet is "shirogane" = "silver"), and so on. It's a prestigious, valuable, interesting thing.
But is there something distinctly silver-y about the city in NW Anatolia? How could there not be, if I'm bothering to write this down? ^_^
In fact, Cyme was home to the earliest coin mint in Greek-speaking lands, and only slightly behind the very first coin minters of the entire world -- their neighbors, the Anatolian-speaking Lydians (including Croesus). Standardized coin minting goes back to around 600 BC, and silver was one of the original materials used. There are silver deposits nearby in Western and NW Anatolia, but the mint that struck some of the earliest coins in world history -- was at Cyme.
It was a center of maritime trade and commerce, so there must have been silver coins flowing all over the place in that city.
By the 2nd C BC, they even honored their legendary founder by minting a coin with the bust of the Amazon in profile, and a prancing horse on the other side, once again linking Amazons with Eastern culture (horse-riders).
It can't be a coincidence that the site of the earliest coin minting, using silver no less, has a name that sounds like the Yeniseian, Turkic, and other Eastern languages' wanderwort for "silver", and that it was named after an Amazon, who would've been Eastern in origin as well, along with her leader Myrina, named after the Eastern Steppe word for "horse".
As with "murin" or "morin", we may not be able to pinpoint precisely which Eastern Steppe language was spoken by the Amazon bearing such a name. However, we can still narrow it down to the Eastern Steppe, now including Yeniseian, unlike with "murin". Those Steppe confederations always included various cultures, and were polyglot.
ReplyDeleteThe point is, the Amazons were from the Eastern Steppe, not Greece or Anatolia, not the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, not elsewhere in Europe -- and seemingly not from Uralic-speaking groups either. All the burials from the 1st millennium BC of women warriors are from the Eastern Steppe, none in the Western Steppe at that time. Further east, like in Japan, women warriors continued through recorded history, into the 2nd millennium AD, as the "onna-musha" or "woman warrior" phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onna-musha
Very lazy people look at the DNA of those buried near the Altai-Sayan Mountains, see that there's a decent minority of Western Steppe DNA, and the rest from Lake Baikal, and conclude that these were Indo-Europeans. Well, genetically, they're not -- they're only partly Yamnaya-like in their DNA.
And culturally, they are DEFINITELY NOT -- since there's no tradition in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, or Europe, or the Mediterranean, of women warriors, especially horse-mounted archers. Just cuz two cultures fuse genetically, doesn't mean they fuse culturally -- sometimes one culture is more dominant than the other. There was no Indo-Euro religion / myth that spread into the Altai-Sayan region, no Indo-Euro language other than Tocharian, and no Indo-Euro practice of keeping women away from battle.
Rather the cultures near the Altai-Sayan Mountains resemble the Japanese to their east, not the Indo-Europeans of any branch to their west. Not even Tocharians were a Steppe nomad people -- they quickly cut through the Altai-Sayan gate, and fled the Steppe southward until they wound up all snuggled up in the Tarim Basin, where they were sedentary, not nomadic, safely away from the Steppe.
Much like the Indo-Iranians fleeing the Steppe to the south, hugging the same mountain range as the Tocharians, just from the western side, until they wound up all snuggled up in the Hindu Kush mountains and the mountain fortress of Iran, safely away from the open Steppe and its horse-riding biker gangs.
Just as the Huns wound up all the way over in Europe, so must have a group of Eastern Steppe baddies wound up in Thrace and NW Anatolia, which is a very quick road trip across open terrain.
It was so long ago, that Myrina was already forgotten by mortals by the time of the Trojan War, and only the gods remembered her tomb. Still, her name left enough of an impression that it reached Homer. And so must have Kyme's name -- they must have remembered some association with "silver", making it fitting for the city surrounded by silver deposits and nearly the 1st in the world to start minting coins, in silver, no less.
Homer still remembered the association between the name Myrina and horses, calling her "polyskarthmos" as though she were a full-galloping or full-striding horse. So who says other Greeks couldn't have remembered the link between Kyme and silver?
I believe. ^_^
Most of the Amazons with names have transparently Greek / Indo-Euro names, and so are later constructions, at least their names. Like "Hippolyta" = "horse unleasher(ess)". But some of them do not have such clearly constructed Greek names, like Myrina and Kyme, so their names are likely original to the legends, and worth looking into for Eastern Steppe linguistic origins.
ReplyDeleteAnother such one is Pitana / Pitane, which has no known etymology. It's near Myrina and Cyme, in the Aeolis region, so it should pay off just like the other two did. I just don't know yet, cuz I haven't looked into it. But I'll do that later / tomorrow.
Like the other two, it's supposedly the name of an Amazon, who gave her name to the city.
Just glancing at it phonetically and phonotactically -- no voiced obstruents, all open syllables, etc. It just looks like a Japanese word. Or it could have a word-final consonant, with Greek feminine "-a" or "-e" tacked on. And yet, that final consonant would be a nasal -- just like Myrina and Kyme. Japanese, in its Middle and later stages, was fine with coda nasals, but not other consonants.
Phonetically, these could all be Crescentine, especially since they lack "o", but ethnographically that's not likely. Crescentine wasn't spoken on the Eastern Steppe, and the cultures that did speak it had no legends of women warriors.
We'll see what turns up...
One detail about Amazons that is made-up is that they avoided most contact with men. From ancient burials near Altai-Sayan and Lake Baikal, to Modern Japanese onna-musha, they were integrated into the same society as the men. They didn't live apart from men.
ReplyDeleteAnd they knew their fathers growing up -- they were not raised by women in an all-woman society. Few or no examples of Japanese onna-musha have a mother who was also onna-musha -- typically, it was their father who was a warrior, of the samurai class.
So the Amazons were daddy's girls, and the Attila's and Genghiz's of that realm were girldads. ^_^
Japan is full of daddy's girls, too -- including honorary JP girls like Irys. That's why Japanese girls are so high on the cool factor, attracting attention from around the world -- it's not just their feminine looks and womanly charm, it's that they have somewhat male-typical interests and activities. Like riding horses -- or in the modern era, motorcycles (not just motor-bikes or mopeds) -- or playing video games, or falconry!
Even a petite girl like Guutara thought it was no big deal to go for a casual stroll around the neighborhood while carrying a bird of prey on her leather-gloved arm, while looking as kawaii as can be the whole time! ^_^
That's not to say there are no such counterparts in the West, but they are very exotic and niche -- biker baddies, horse girls, girls who shoot guns, etc. In the Eastern Steppe, you don't need to be part of the rural countryside population with rustic tastes, to want to carry a bird of prey on your arm during an ordinary stroll around your liberal, civilized, urban neighborhood.
The spirit of the Steppe will always be reincarnated in the people of Glorious Nippon!
Even having a driver's license is more common in Japan than America, for girls. In Holo EN, famously no one has a driver's license, other than Mumei -- who was always a suspected horse-girl, though she would never admit it! ^_^ She was openly a wolf-girl, and that's very Eastern Steppe as well. Wolf, horse -- some kind of wild roaming spirit animal. That's the kind of girl who 100% has a driver's license and is the driver for road trips.
ReplyDeleteWhereas lots of Holo JP girls not only have driver's licenses, but even motorcycle licenses -- including soft-spoken, kawaii cuties like Luna, as well as racing fans like Chihaya.
In the West and Southeast Asia, you might find quirky girls who want to drive a Vespa motor-scooter a la Amelie, but that's about it, and they're *not* the type to shoot guns or play video games. Biker baddies are very niche here.
Perhaps Westerners got the impression of Amazons being part of a female-only segregated society due to the sex-segregated honor culture of Eastern Steppe people. The onna-musha of Japan, while inhabiting the same society as men, were more likely to live the life of a nun and join a nunnery, just like their male counterparts, who were likely to live like monks and join a monastery.
ReplyDeleteThat's the spiritual, moral, honor-based part of the warrior class in the East, and you can see how it might lead Westerners to believe that the Amazons were a woman-only society -- as though their entire society were one great big nunnery or all-girls' school (which are still common in Japan, but virtually non-existent in America these days).
But the monasteries and nunneries were just two components of the same warrior class of their whole society, not separate societies unto themselves.
Potential solution to the Amazon name "Pitana", who gave her name to a Greek Anatolian city Pitana / Pitane, like Myrina and Cyme. Nothing turned up in Yeniseian, Japonic, Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic, or most of Uralic... however, in the Samoyedic branch of Uralic, which is close to the origin of the family and pretty far east (only Ainu is further east), there's a P-S word "pitmä" which means "trousers, pants".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/pitm%C3%A4
Its further etymology is unknown, and doesn't seem to have cognates elsewhere in Uralic, so it could be an Eastern Steppe wanderwort, especially considering that it's a kind of technology, designed for horse-riders rather than crop-cultivators or pastoralists who don't ride horses. For a quick review of the cultural evolution of pants among horse-riding nomads, see Peter Turchin's posts from awhile ago, which include ancient art of the Amazons wearing pants (like all good Eastern horse-riding folk):
https://peterturchin.com/cultural-evolution-of-pants/
https://peterturchin.com/cultural-evolution-of-pants-ii/
Samoyedic was the oldest branch to leave Proto-Uralic, so this word is pretty damn old, and P-S originated near the Altai-Sayan region, including some languages that used to be spoken right on the Steppe, not just the northern forest zone, where it's confined to now.
It's not of P-Indo-Euro origin, cuz it has 2 "a"s, and P-IE lacks "a". Not to mention, P-IE people were not nomadic horse-riders, they were agro-pastoralists who practiced transhumance pastoralism, with settlements that they regularly returned to or lived in year-round, while minding their herds. Certainly P-IE people did not pass on such a technology to any culture they ever interacted with or provided the seed for.
It's also not Sino-Tibetan, since the Old Chinese word for "trousers" is "ku", and they adopted the technology from Eastern Steppe people, not the other way around.
Semantically, it would make sense for an Amazon to be named as "(she of the) pants", i.e. "the pants-wearer". Not only would this emphasize her being a horse-rider, and an Easterner, but also how unusual it was for a woman to wear pants -- even back in ancient times, that was still rare, for civilized people.
Phonetically, it's pretty close, aside from the nasal being "m" in P-S instead of "n". Due to Uralic phonotactics, any vowel between the "t" and nasal would've been deleted in Samoyedic, so the original wanderwort could've had a vowel between them, including "a".
As for the "m" vs. "n", that could be due to Samoyedic phonotactics as well. There are about 10 words in P-S that have the sequence "tm", including several others whose initial consonant is "p", but 0 that have "tn". In P-Uralic, neither sequence is allowed.
So if the word is originally from outside of Samoyedic, and was "pitana", this would get re-shaped and altered into "pitma" in Samoyedic (delete the 2nd vowel to make it CVCCV, alter "n" to "m" since "tn" is not allowed but "tm" is).
Whatever Eastern Steppe source provided this word to P-S, could've also provided it to the name of an Amazon who took a typical road trip westward across the Steppe, down through Thrace, and wound up in NW Anatolia, where she was remembered as "the pants-wearer". ^_^
Japanese word for "pants" is from ancient Sayan Mountains, confirming again their origin from there! I didn't even notice until reading the entire entry on "pitmä" in Proto-Samoyedic, but there's one dialect in the far south, the Koibal dialect of Kamassian, where it is "pakma". Due to the 1st vowel being "a" instead of "i" (or rounded "i") as in all the others, it's not clear that this is derived from the same source as the others.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the Koibal people currently speak a Turkic language, but Wikipedia says they used to not only speak Kamassian (a now extinct Samoyedic language in the Sayan Mountains), but also a Yeniseian language, and the current culture is a fusion or mixture of these two backgrounds. That's just what I said about Turkic as a whole -- it's a creole of Uralic and Yeniseian.
Unfortunately, there are no words for "pants" beginning with a "p" in any Yeniseian langauge. I was thinking maybe there's one with a labialized "k" or "q", which turned into "p". But the only pants-related word in Yeniseian is "qat", whose 1st consonant is not labialized in any reconstruction, and whose 2nd C is not "k". It originally meant "fur", and was extended to refer to leggings made of fur, then leggings or pants in general, in Arin and Pumpokol. So, no evident Yeniseian connection...
But wait just a second -- "pakma" is just like the Japonic word for "pants", which is now "hakama", but whose "h" used to be "p" in Proto-Japonic. So it would've been "pakama". It's attested very early -- the 8th C, during the Old Japanese stage.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A2%B4#Japanese
But it's also in Okinawan, in the Ryukyuan branch of Japonic, and also pronounced "hakama". Like Japanese, Okinawan turned "p" into "h", including for the homophone "paka" = "grave" from P-J:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/paka
So, this word for "pants" = "hakama" (earlier "pakama"), absolutely goes back to the P-J stage, and was brought with from mainland Asia, before they entered the Japanese islands.
Like the Koibal people, the Japanese have some influence from Uralic people -- and not just the Ainu. Their earlier language, Wa, was put through a filter that stripped out all the voiced obstruents, and opened up the syllable structure, which is more like Uralic than Yeniseian, which Wa is a sister to. Of course, Japonic also has its origins in the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family, so it's like Koibal in having both Uralic and Yeniseian parents.
But in this case, the similarity can precisely narrow down which part of Uralic, or even Samoyedic, the Japonic language was nearby -- the Koibal dialect of Kamassian. That's the one where the word for "pants" has "a" instead of "i" as the 1st vowel, and where they are otherwise the same, except for the Uralic word having a typical Uralic syllable shape of CVCCV, and Japonic having a typical shape of CVCVCV.
That makes it impossible to tell who originated it, just comparing the two of them. If the Koibal word is original, then Japonic would break up the medial consonant sequence, and default to "a" by vowel harmony with the surrounding vowels, or cuz "ka" is by far the most common "k" syllable in OJ. On the other hand, if the Japonic word is original, Uralic would delete the 2nd vowel to make it CVCCV.
However, it sure doesn't look like the Koibal dialect word is Uralic -- all of its relatives in the Samoyedic branch have "i" as the 1st vowel, not "a", which is a very irregular vowel change. The Koibal word is the one with an "odd man out" look to it -- which means the Japonic word must be the original, and the Koibal dialect borrowed it from the Wa people, when they were still living on the Eastern Steppe, in the Altai-Sayan region, which is where their creation of the landmasses myth comes from.
There's some disagreement about how to reconstruct the P-S word for "pants", including what the 2nd consonant is, probably cuz it was a regional wanderwort in ancient times, with several variants in circulation. One of those was Wa / Japonic "pakama", and one dialect of a southern Samoyedic language used this same word (with Uralic phonotactics squeezing out the 2nd vowel).
ReplyDeleteIt's more parsimonious to assume that this was a Wa / Japonic coinage, and Koibal borrowed it, rather than assuming that they both borrowed from some unknown 3rd source -- only posit 2 actors, rather than 3, unless necessary.
The main point, though, is that this is yet another crucial piece of evidence placing the ancestors of the Japanese smack dab in middle of the Sayan Mountains, before they left the mainland and entered the Japanese islands.
Moreover, it's another crucial piece of evidence that these Wa ancestors were horse-riders from the Eastern Steppe, who had a word for "pants" at the earliest stage of their language -- cuz that's what they wore.
The Japanese did not become pants-wearing horse-riders only during the Kofun era (4th - 6th C AD), when pants are attested in haniwa clay sculptures depicting people of the time. They were wearing pants, and had a word for pants, well back into the 1st millennium BC, when they were still roaming around the Eastern Steppe, with their home base in the Sayan Mountains.
Who would've thought that pants would be such a great big skeleton key unlocking so many secrets of the mist-enshrouded past? Students of horse-riding nomadism, that's who! ^_^
Let's figure out the etymology of P-J "pakama" = "pants", since the entry at Wiktionary is way off-base. The guess there is that it's a native Japanese compound, where "ma" is a vowel-shifted form of "mo" = "skirt-type clothing" that goes over the pants, and where "haka" is a vowel-shifted or irregular conjugation of the verb "haku" = "to pull onto the lower body, as in trousers".
ReplyDeleteWell, when there are 2 major irregularities in a single derivation, it's over. The "mo" to "ma" shift isn't totally unbelievable, but "haku" is definitely NOT an earlier verb which was later used to coin a compound for pants. The full word, "hakama" (rather, "pakama") appears in the earliest Japanese texts, of the 8th C AD. The verb does not.
So instead, the derivation went the other way -- the original word was "pakama", meaning "pants". Sometime later, during OJ, it was reanalyzed as a compound, tempted by the semi-similarity between "ma" and "mo", which is also an item of clothing for the lower body. But since "mo" wraps around like a skirt, then "ma" must be the kind of clothing that is pulled onto the legs. They took "haka" to be a modifier which referred to the "pulling onto the legs" method of getting dressed, and gave it the obligatory "-u" verb suffix, to coin a new verb "haku".
This verb "haku" is not listed as being in Okinawan, confirming it's a later derivation in Japanese only. Both of them have "hakama", from P-J "pakama", so it's the original form.
Ok, that's what it does *not* mean. What *does* it mean?
I actually think "pakama" is a compound from native Japonic roots, not a wanderwort -- or if it is, Japonic originated it.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the P-J word for "shin, lower leg" is "paki", which was later re-analyzed and rendaku-fied into "pagi" during OJ. There is no evidence for a nasal before "k", so it wasn't "panki". The unusual pitch accents suggest a possible contraction in the 1st syllable, which could've originally been "pai", based on the cognates below.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/panki
There's another hint that the leg or lower body was referred to by "pa", in the P-J word for "snake", whose reconstruction is debated, but whose first mora is "pa" (first syllable "pai"). A snake is an animal whose entire body is its lower-body appendage.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/paimpi
There's a reduplicated P-J form "papai" for "fly" -- the insect with many legs.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/papai
Another many-legged bug is P-J "pati" = "bee, wasp"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/pati
So, it's fair to talk about "pa" or "pai" as a Japonic root relating to the lower body, or its appendages, or specifically the leg rather than foot. Perhaps this is the source of the vowel variation in the Samoyedic words, if they are ultimately borrowed from Japonic -- Koibal took the "a", while the others took the "i" from the sequence "ai" in "pai".
P-J doesn't allow vowel sequences, but maybe Pre-P-J did. Or P-J had not yet standardized which of the 2 vowels in a sequence would be used in the combining form. Or maybe it related to which of the 2 would replace the other in a sequence. Either way, the P-J word for "leg" sets up a vowel variation that is observed in the Samoyedic words for "pants", altering between "a" and "i", which are not close to each other and could not come from a shared ancestor -- so perhaps they are two ways of resolving a dipthong or vowel sequence, "ai".
As for "ka" in "pakama", this could be the combining form of P-J "kai", which means "hair, fur" and later "wool". This is the same semantic approach of Yeniseian "qat", but with different phonetic form.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/kai
Then "pa + ka" means "leg + fur", not in the sense of body hair that grows from the leg, but a piece of animal fur that is worn on the leg, like leggings or pants.
Alternatively, the "k" could belong to "pa", as in "paki" = "leg". That would make the "a" after "k" irregular, since it should be "i". The only way to make that regular would be if the following morpheme were "ama", so that the sequence "ia" would be resolved into just "a", according to Japonic rules for vowel sequences (generally, the 2nd one replaces the 1st one, except in the 1st syllable of a word). But I don't see any way to make "ama" a morpheme here, it means "sweet".
So, "paka" is either "a piece of fur for the leg" or an irregular form of "leg".
Finally, "ma" is not an irregular form of "mo" = "skirt", it's P-J "ma", and it means "room, space", and is used to refer to the space between two things.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/ma
Unlike skirts, robes, tunics, etc., which look like a single unbroken piece of clothing, pants have a clear split or space or room in between the two leg-pieces.
In fact, this is similar to the semantics of the word "breeches" in English, which traces back to Proto-Germanic "brōks", which comes from the P-IE verb "bʰreg" = "to break, crack, split". That is, "breeches" are a kind of lower-body clothing with a break, crack, or split in them, unlike a robe or tunic which looks like a single unbroken piece below the waist, where the space between the legs is obscured.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/br%C5%8Dks
Japonic uses the concept of "space between two things" -- but that's very similar to "a crack, split, or break between two sides of a thing".
Of course, pants cannot be the empty space between the two leg-pieces -- they are the two leg-pieces themselves. But this item of clothing can be referred to as a "gap, space, room" figuratively -- it's a lower-body clothing that has a characteristic gap, space, or room somewhere, as opposed to lower-body clothing that has no such gap or space anywhere.
Putting it all together, "pakama" breaks down into "pa + ka + ma", where "pa" is the combining form of "pa" or "pai" = "leg", "ka" = combining form of "fur, wool", and "ma" = "room, space, gap". That is, "pakama" are "leg furs (with a) gap".
If "paka" is an irregular form of "paki", that makes "pakama" = "leg gap", where "ma" means not merely "gap" but "item of clothing characterized by a gap", and "paka" modifies it to say where that item of clothing is worn -- on the leg.
I think "pa + ka + ma" is the right derivation, not "paka + ma" that involves the irregular form of "paki". "Pa + ka + ma" has no phonetic irregularities, the "pa" and "ma" morphemes are basically the same as in "paka" and "ma", but "ka" = "fur, wool" gives it the clear meaning of it being a piece of clothing, and is semantically similar to the Yeniseian words for pants derived from "fur".
Wrapping this all up, that means "pakama" is a Proto-Japonic word for "pants", and it is entirely of native P-J roots and assembled using P-J morphology. It's not a borrowing from anywhere, or a substrate word, etc. It was coined when the Wa people still lived in the Sayan Mountains, since it was borrowed by the Koibal dialect of Kamassian, where its 2nd V was removed to make it fit Uralic phonotactics, yielding "pakma".
ReplyDeleteIn the other Samoyedic languages, there's no overt evidence that the 2nd C is "t" -- Enets has nothing after "pi" at all, Nenets has "q" (like "k" only further back), the other dialects of Kamassian have "?" (glottal stop, also a back voiceless stop), and Selkup deleted it and in some cases used compensatory lengthening of the following "m" to make a geminate "mm". The final syllable being "mä" is not in question".
And again, the only difference in the 1st V is most are "i" or rounded "i", except Koibal being "a".
So, it's possible to explain all of these as borrowings from Proto-Japonic, or Pre-Proto-Japonic, with underlying form "paikama", and whose vowel sequence / dipthong was reflected differently in the Samoyedic borrowers.
Unfortunately, this shoots my theory of the Amazon name "Pitana" in the foot, as it were. Well, that's fine -- I don't know what her name means, or what language it came from... yet. But I did discover something far more substantial and important -- that Proto-Samoyedic borrowed a (Pre?)Proto-Japonic word for "pants", when all were living in the Altai-Sayan region. That makes the Japonic word "pa(i)kama" a candidate for the earliest word for "pants"!
Just maybe, they were the first ones to invent the item of clothing itself, and were therefore the first to give it a name. Why else would Samoyedic borrow the Japonic word, unless they were seen as the inventors of this new-fangled piece of clothing? Just like how we borrow the Japanese word for "kimono" or "katana", if we think they invented those things. Or the Greek word "toga", if we think the Greeks invented that thing.
Apparently, the Samoyedic people believed the Wa people had invented pants, and borrowed the Wa / Japonic word for them.
So, next time you find yourself wearing pants rather than a kilt or robe -- remember to thank Glorious Nippon. They invented pants, even before they landed in Japan! ^_^
Crescentine origin of ancient word for Canaan + Syria, rendered in Egyptian as "Rechenu" ("ch" as in English, usually transcribed "Retjenu").
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/r%E1%B9%AFnw#Egyptian
The only guess as to its origin is Proto-Semitic "ʔarṣ́" = "earth". Not bad semantically, but the missing initial glottal stop and a vowel makes it doubtful.
Instead, I compare it to the Etruscans' name for themselves, which was also the generic word for "people" -- typical way of referring to your own ethnic group as "the people". Namely, Rasna, which probably used to have an "e" between the "s" and "n", but it weakened due to being unstressed, then deleted / unwritten:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%90%8C%93%F0%90%8C%80%F0%90%8C%94%F0%90%8C%8D%F0%90%8C%80
The "na" there could be the patronymic suffix "-na", "descendant of". This same suffix is "-nu" in closely related Raetic, within the Tyrsenian / Iceman family. So there's no reason it couldn't be reflected as "-nu" in the Levant, where Crescentine is a local substrate before the arrival of Semitic.
The initial consonant is the same, though not the 1st vowel -- could be a sound correspondence between two branches of the Crescentine family. Likewise the 2nd consonant is "ch" in the Egyptian rendering, which is probably close to its original form in the Levant -- not simple "s" as in the Etruscan word, which Egyptian would have no trouble rendering as "s". That makes the "ch" in "Rechenu" more like the sound transcribed as "z" in Etruscan and elsewhere, a palatal / post-alveolar affricate, like "ts" or "ch" in English. Could be another correspondence between the two branches of Crescentine.
The 2nd vowel is "e" in both words.
A partial solution is the Etruscan word "restm" / "rastum" = "land", which was the semantic target for the Semitic etymology. Well well well, now we're talking! The 1st vowel can be "e" as in "Rechenu", and there's a sequence "st" which is "ts" with metathesis, although unclear which is the original Proto-Crescentine form -- but still making the two words far closer than just "s" and "ch".
Since this word also shows vowel alternation for the 1st vowel, allowing "a", that ties it into "Ras(e)na" -- "descendant of the land" or "belonging to the land". In "Ras(e)na", the "t" has been deleted to simplify a problematic consonant sequence that would otherwise be "stn".
That would make "-um" in "rastum" a generic noun suffix, seen elsewhere in "methlum" = "district, nation, people, territory", "lauchum" = "king", and so on. So the root of "restm" / "rastum" is "rast-".
Then both Etruscan "Ras(e)na" and the Levantine name rendered in Egyptian as "Rechenu" are both Crescentine in origin, meaning the same thing -- "belonging to the land" or "descendant of the land". From its use as an ethnonym, it could be extended to refer to the territory they control, as a toponym.
^_^
Peko-chan's new outfit showcased the dual nature of Japanese girls, which goes all the way back to the original Amazons. The main outfit was a feminine gyaru look, for the pretty popular preppy type of girl -- but then she said that every girl like this has a hidden side... and then BAM, a leather jacket-wearing biker gang baddie outfit! They're called yanki in Japan, what we used to call burn-out, drop-out, juvenile delinquent, etc.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, they do hang out in all-girl groups, cliques, or gangs, especially when the crime rate was rising (1960s and '70s). Some pictures of these latter-day Amazons:
https://www.vintag.es/2018/10/sukeban.html
https://www.instagram.com/p/DPrV3wRCX0E/
Like the original Amazons, they were / are far more common in Eastern Steppe cultures like Japan, and an almost non-existent niche in the Western Steppe off-shoots like America. They were more of a figment of the media's imagination here, mainly existing in exploitation movies like High School Hellcats, She-Devils on Wheels, and the like.
They were shown in exploitation movies in Japan as well, but the phenomenon was more widespread IRL.
In fact, if you listen to any random sample of Japanese people, you'll hear a story about how their mom or aunt used to be a yanki type. Like Lui from Hololive -- her mom is a former yanki, who still has a brusque hot-tempered manner, which she passed on to Lui's brother, whereas Lui and her dad are more low-key.
It's like in America, you can hear Zoomers talking about how their parents used to be grunge, alternative, or maybe neo-hippies, or ravers, back in the '90s. Sure, it was a common sub-culture, not a tiny niche. Same with goth. Soon, Gen Alpha will be talking about how their moms used to be xXx.sCeNe.xXx gurlz when they were young. ^_^
But in Japan, all-girl bad-girl gangs have had a similar level of prevalence, even though it's a far less violent or criminal country than America. Just cuz you smoke, wear pants, and ride motorcycles, doesn't mean you're a serial killer or drug dealer. Likewise with the Amazons, or the onna-musha. They weren't villains in a horror movie. They're just the bad-girls at school. ^_^
From "rags" to linguistic riches! Another Crescentine journey. Starting with Greek, or rather Pre-Greek, there's "rakos" = "rag, tattered garment". It also means "wrinkles, rents in the face" -- both having to do with undoing the structure or texture of a material, so that it's not whole and smooth anymore, by ripping, creasing, etc.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BF%A5%CE%AC%CE%BA%CE%BF%CF%82
When in doubt about Pre-Greek, ask the substrate of Finno-Volga-land. In this case, there's a clearly non-Uralic word since it begins with "r" -- which also shows that the Greek word is not Indo-Euro, since they can't begin with "r" (and a preceding laryngeal would leave a prothetic vowel in Greek).
It's "raćɜ", and it means "rag; to fray, rip open, unfasten". This matches both the noun from Pre-Greek, as well as the connotation of undoing the structure of a material to produce such a thing. Ripping or fraying a whole cloth, in order to produce a rag from it.
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=851
It's also listed as "rańćɜ", with medial "n", but this is a pervasive pattern in Uralic, where the post-alveolar and palatal stops sometimes come with a preceding nasal, and sometimes do not. This is not the widespread pre-nasalization pattern of Pre-Greek, since it only applies to these 2 consonants, not stops or consonants in general. In this case, given the clear semantic and otherwise perfect phonetic connection to the Pre-Greek word, it originally did not have the nasal, which was intrusive in the branches that have it.
Greek didn't have a palatal stop, so it shifted it back to "k" instead. If it were the post-alveolar stop, maybe it would've been shifted forward to "t". But palatal is further back than post-alveolar, so it's natural to assign it to velar rather than alveolar position.
Alternatively, the Pre-Greek word has the 2nd C in the right position, and the F-V substrate innovated by moving it slightly forward to palatal. If only there were a language we could use to triangulate...
Well, look who it is -- our good ol' friend Sumerian. One of the very few words beginning with "r", that is not a borrowing from Semitic, is "rah", where "h" is a velar fricative. This matches the Pre-Greek word, except Greek hardened it into a stop "k" since it doesn't have velar fricatives (or any, aside from "s" and "h" before it was lost). Among its related meanings are "to break, crush, to thresh grain with a flail". These verbs are about undoing the structure of a material, so that it lies in coarse-textured broken fragments -- not just for the fun of breaking stuff, but to utilize these smaller fragments, like separating the edible wheat from the inedible chaff.
https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu//epsd2/o0036961
Always a joy when Sumerian makes an appearance. ^_^
Of course, English "rag" belongs to this group of words as well, and now things get interesting, since the Germanic forms lead to a possible P-IE source, which was also a loan / substrate from Crescentine, not a native I-E word.
ReplyDeleteThe English word goes back to Middle English, and possibly Old English "ragg", which is related to Old Norse "rǫgg", from P-Germanic "rawwō". The Norse words don't refer to cloth and rags, but to ripping the fur off of sheep in order to get usable bristles and wool. Similar semantics, though, including the action of ripping (poor sheep!).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ragg
OK, so what is the supposed P-IE root of these Germanic words about rags and ripping? It's "(H)rewH" -- and the fact that the initial "H" is in parenthesis is a huge red flag, since there is no trace of it in the descendants, which all begin with "r", contrary to native I-E roots. The "H" is only put there to make it look like a native I-E word, which cannot begin with "r", but which may begin with a laryngeal followed by "r". But you never know, it could've been there -- there's no Greek or Armenian or Anatolian reflexes that could prove it.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/(H)rewH-
It has to do with "to dig out, to uproot" -- which is an agrarian cultivation term, and definitely NOT from the pastoralist Indo-Euros, but a nearby group of agrarian speakers, like Crescentine. It also means "to rip, to tear" -- Wiktionary adds "open" to those verbs, but it has nothing to do with open. The "open" sense is only included to shoe-horn the Tocharian word "ru" = "to open" into the group, which has nothing to do with ripping, tearing, digging, breaking down structure or texture, ragged or rough textures, etc. It comes from a different Crescentine source, which I'll get to after I'm done with this "rags" to riches journey.
Although the P-IE word has plenty of descendants, and was altered in productive ways for further shades of nuance -- there's just no way this is a native I-E root. It seems to begin with "r", and the primary sense about digging up and uprooting is too agrarian or horticultural to have been coined by pastoralists.
If only there were *one more* language we could use to triangulate...
And it's Arabic to the rescue! Well, the Pre-Semitic Crescentine substrate in Arabic, to be exact. There's a root that has no cognates in NW Semitic, East, or South Semitic, let alone Saharo-Arabian -- so it's likely a local substrate.
ReplyDeleteThe 3-consonant root is "kh - r - q", and it generates a bunch of verbs relating to "to tear" and "to break", as well as a noun "khirqa" meaning "rag". Bingo!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Arabic_roots/%D8%AE_%D8%B1_%D9%82
This looks A LOT like the supposed P-IE root "(H)rewH", since prime candidates for the laryngeals are velar fricatives and uvular stops. Since the Arabic root is not from native Semitic origin, it may not perfectly reflect the Crescentine original. But it does give much better resolution into the original sounds, since Arabic has a zillion consonants in a zillion different places and manners, unlike Greek or Uralic.
It's hard to judge what the original vowels were, since Arabic only clues us into the consonants. The main vowel we want to confirm is the one after "r" and before the back consonant -- it's "a" almost everywhere. But sadly, that vowel has been deleted in "khirqa". The "a" in that position for the verbs is obligatory for the infinitive form of verbs, it's not necessarily what was there in the original.
The Crescentine words have "a", but P-IE has "ew" -- due to P-IE not having "a" in its inventory, and relying mainly on "e" and "o". It likely chose "e" instead of "o" since "a" is unrounded.
If the Arabic root is derived from the same ultimate source as the P-IE one -- some very old Crescentine word relating to ripping, probably about ripping plants out of the ground as cultivators do -- then that means the other Crescentine words have deleted the initial consonant, and preserved only the "rak"-like portion.
The P-IE root shows no vowel between initial "H" and "r", so maybe when they borrowed it from a Crescentine source, the 1st vowel had already weakened / deleted, bringing the first 2 consonants into contact. Crescentine languages do not like consonant clusters at word boundaries, at most a medial sequence, so perhaps this new form had its now initial consonant cluster simplified into just "r". Crescentine, unlike other families, is fine with initial "r", it's one of its shibboleths. Maybe that's why "r" was chosen over whatever the original initial was -- the one reflected in Arabic "kh" and the supposed "H" of P-IE.
Back fricatives being deleted when followed by "r" in the onset cluster of a word, is well attested -- like in Indo-European itself, with those "Hr"-initial words. So maybe it happened during the evolution of Crescentine as well, perhaps under "areal influence" of P-IE, or vice versa.
Could the Arabic root have come from the P-IE root? No -- there are no branches of I-E with this reflex that are near Arabic's urheimat in the Syrian Desert. It's not in Anatolian, Armenian, or Hellenic. Iranian showed up too late to donate the word, it's too far east of the Syrian Desert, and Iranian lost the initial "H" anyway, so it could only donate an "r"-initial form. The closest is Italic, but that also lost the "H".
Really, only Anatolian could have donated it to Arabic, but it's not in Anatolian at all. Also, Anatolian would mainly spread influence to the coastal Levant, which was incorporated into the Hittite Empire, and yet there is no cognate of the Arabic root in the NW Semitic languages.
The fact that it's not in Anatolian also suggests it's a borrowing from after P-IE proper, although it is in Tocharian, so it's not so late. But, not at the origin of the I-E family.
One man's rags are another man's riches... ^_^
ReplyDeleteCrescentine word for "horse" underlies wanderwort for "donkey", which is also of Crescentine origin.
ReplyDeleteFirst, we start with coverage of the phonetically related words for "donkey". You already know one of these -- "ass" in English (now only preserved inside a compound, "jackass"), which ultimately comes from Latin "asinus", also the source of our word "asinine" (acting like a donkey).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asinus#Latin
Turns out, this Latin word is not Italic or Indo-European at all. Wiktionary notes that it must have been adopted from some substrate after the 4th C BC, since it does not show the sound change of "s" -> "r" between vowels, which was productive in Latin before that date. They note the similarity to the Luwian word (from the Anatolian branch of I-E), "tarkasna", which has "asna" inside it.
However, Latin didn't necessarily adopt it from a substrate within Anatolia, although Luwian certainly did, since they lived in Anatolia and were carrying over vocabulary from their Pre-Indo-Euro cultures. Romans did not extensively colonize Anatolia, so it's less likely to have come from there. Sure, maybe the Roman soldiers heard the local word for "donkey" when they were doing military supply chains, where donkeys were pack animals. Still, less likely than a local substrate in Italy.
And that would be Etruscan. Unfortunately, there's no trace of this word in the slim recordings of Etruscan, but it's more likely the origin based on geography. Also based on the timing -- the Roman Empire unified Italy during the 3rd C BC, and began incorporating the Etruscans, and many other cultures of the peninsula, into a single Latin-speaking mega-culture. Plus, Etruscan is a sister language to the relevant substrate in Anatolia, which is similar to Hattic -- both from the Crescentine family. Sadly, no trace of it in the slim recordings of Hattic either.
Latin must have inserted the "i" to break up the "sn" cluster. It was a typical epenthetic vowel, if not involving stop consonants (in which case "u" was typical), and in this case conditioned by the surrounding consonants, both of which are alveolar and closer to "i" than "u".
Most European languages ultimately borrowed their word for "donkey" from this Latin word, or its Latin derivative "asellus", which has the Latin / I-E diminuitive suffix "-lus", but without the "n" in the root -- only "ase". It's not "asinellus". We'll get to that in a bit, just noting for now that the root comes in a form without "n", only "ase".
Our good ol' Crescentine friend Sumerian shows up in this word group as well, where the word for "donkey" and "equid" in general is "anše":
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%92%80%B2#Sumerian
Notice the post-alveolar sibilant "š", not alveolar "s". Sumerian, like Crescentine in general, has two sibilants. The fact that it chose "š" means that must have been the original sibilant, not "s".
Also there's metathesis from "šn".
Sumerian words want to be of shape CVC, so this looks about as ass-backwards as can be -- both edges of the word are vowels, not consonants, and there's a medial consonant sequence in an atomic / non-compound word, which is very rare in Sumerian. But then, so is initial "r". I take this case to be one of the rare exceptions that was preserved from a much older stage of the language, when it was closer to other Crescentine languages, and was preserved due to the frequency of its usage, given the importance of horses and donkeys in their economy (mostly as pack and draft animals).
Given the vast distance between Sumeria and the other regions this word is attested in, it's probably not a loanword. Probably not from a local substrate either -- Sumerian is so old, a Pre-Sumerian substrate would be far too old to be the source of this word. Also, any Pre-Sumerian substrate would have its word for "donkey" in common with the other regions far away and more later in time -- very unlikely. Rather, it is native to Sumerian itself, and it was inherited from Proto-Crescentine.
There's Ancient Greek "onos" and Mycenaean Greek "o-no", both meaning "donkey". Note the vowel variability between Greek and the others, where this word begins with "o", which we'll see in the final reveal. Also, Greek must have deleted the "s" in coda position, since this is the only variant that has "n" but not "s". All the others have "s", and sometimes "n" as well.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%84%CE%BD%CE%BF%CF%82
Last example before the final reveal, is Semitic "ʔatān", which means "female donkey":
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Semitic/%CA%94at%C4%81n-
This is likely *not* original to Semitic, where the word "ḥimār" = "donkey" is far more widespread in the family, including Old South Arabian. Although it still excludes South Semitic. But regardless of "ḥimār", there's even less range for "ʔatān", so it could be adopted from a local substrate, which must be Crescentine.
The initial glottal stop is a prothetic consonant, to prevent a Semitic word beginning with a vowel. There's also variability in the stop consonant within the NW branch, alternating between stop "t" and fricative "th" (as in English "thin"), within both Aramaic and Canaanite. To me, that says there was something more continuant to the original consonant -- and given the neary words having "š" in that part of the word, Semitic de-sibilated it into a "t / th".
This is the only form with a non-sibilant consonant in that position, possibly from a regional dialect of Crescentine that had begun to de-sibilate it into an affricate like "ch", and Semitic took it further into "t / th".
Notably, Akkadian "atānum" did not borrow it from Sumerian "anše" -- Akkadian has the non-sibilant version, as well as the original order of the nasal (2nd C, not 1st C). So, Akkadian has a variant that is older than Sumerian "anše", yet in the same geographical region -- and therefore, Akkadian points to the older Sumerian form, before it altered to "anše" and was closer to "ašne" like the other Crescentine examples.
Old South Arabian and South Semitic are absent here cuz they're too far away from the urheimat of Crescentine, which is Anatolia.
OK, now for the Uralic skeleton key to unlock yet another mystery of prehistory -- well, the Pre-Uralic Crescentine substrate in Finno-Volga-land, to be exact. There's a word in the Mari and Permic branches, which means "stallion" i.e. "male horse" -- not donkey, but horse, the most salient of the various equid species, from a human point-of-view. It is "ašɜ" (possibly but less likely, "ošɜ").
ReplyDeletehttps://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1192
Also in the F-V substrate is a word for "female animal", which means "reindeer cow" in Sami, and "mare" i.e. "female horse" in Mordvinic. It's "ältɜ".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1194
AFAICT, this female variant doesn't show up in the other regions relating to equids, but maybe I'm missing something. The point here is that it shows the Crescentine substrate distinguished horses of both genders, which is usually due to breeding them for domestication. You don't care what a male vs. female woodpecker is called -- it's just a generic woodpecker, whose reproduction is irrelevant to your economy. But if you're breeding them for domestication, you care which is male and which is female, to join them up properly.
The likely sequence of events is that originally "ašɜ" was genderless, a generic word for "horse", back when it was just another wild animal from the surroundings. Later, as taming and domestication of it began, a new word for the female was coined, "ältɜ". This led to a semantic narrowing of the original word, to mean "male horse", as it's attested in Mari and Permic. It's less likely that both gendered words are from the same early stage -- since all animal species begin as wild species whose reproduction is not relevant.
How do we know the original genderless word was "ašɜ" instead of "ältɜ"? Based on external comparisons, where all sorts of equid-related words are based on "ašɜ", not "ältɜ". That means the coinages relating to "donkey, regardless of gender" must have happened early in the history of the Crescentine family, when "ašɜ" meant "horse" rather than narrowly "male horse". "Donkey" and "horse" are not related by anything having to do with gender, but being closely related species or families, so the coinage of generic "donkey" is more likely to have come from a generic word for "horse" rather than "stallion".
Well... except, remember the Semitic word specifically means "female donkey", not generic "donkey". So it's possible that Semitic reflects the female-specific substrate word, derived from "ältɜ". Semantically, both are the female-specific word, not generic. And phonetically, we get a MUCH BETTER match now, since the cluster "lt" is much easier to turn into a "t / th" sound. That is, either by deleting the continuant "l" and keeping stop "t" -- or fusing them into a continuant form of "t", namely "th", QED.
So that's likely the reason why Akkadian did not borrow from Sumerian -- Akkadian borrowed a different substrate word, more like "ältɜ" than "ašɜ", referring specifically to "female donkey". But it still has the 2nd C being "n", which we'll get to soon -- it's from a Crescentine suffix, not the root.
Returning to Latin "asellus", which is based on "ase", notice that's the generic word for "horse" in the F-V substrate (later narrowed to mean "male horse"). Semantic narrowing aside, the point is that phonetically this Latin word does not have "n" anywhere, unlike the others. It has a Latin diminuitive "-lus" attached to a foreign root "ase". Since diminuitive suffixes are used for coining words for related species, "ase + -lus" must mean "horse + like", and that's what a donkey is. It's another equid species, just not the most salient one to use (horse).
ReplyDeleteLatin also has "asinus", without the Latin diminuitive, and now with the "n". That's the clue that the "n" is the start of a suffix -- but in Crescentine, and it was used the same way, to coin a "horse-like species" word.
This suffix is amply attested in Etruscan, where it's "na" as in many of the donkey-words (like "asna" in the Luwian word "tarkasna"). It can be used to mean "pertaining to, relating to" -- like the English suffixes "-ish" or "-like". But it's also used in the gentilic sense, like "descendant of a common ancestor, belonging to the same clan or family".
Sure enough, that's the Greek suffix that scientists use for species names like "equid" -- it comes from Greek "-ides", which is a gentilic suffix, "belonging to the same clan / descendant of".
So, Latin produced the same meaning from the same Crescentine root (to Latin ears, "as(e)"), with two different suffixes, one Latin and the other the original Crescentine "-na". Both the root and the Crescentine suffix are from the local Crescentine substrate in Italy, i.e. Etruscan.
But Etruscan was not the only Crescentine language to coin a word for "donkey" based on the old genderless word for "horse" plus a suffix that's "pertaining to; belonging to the same family". This word must've been coined very early in Crescentine history, and inherited into its descendant branches, of which Etruscan is only one. The Pre-IE substrate in Anatolia is another, which was adopted into Luwian "tarkasna". Sumerian is another (with metathesis). And the Pre-Greek substrate which supplied "onos" (recall the slight possibility that the Mari + Permic words could begin with "o" -- unlikely, but possible given the Pre-Greek version beginning with "o" as well).
What about elsewhere in Uralic? The Mordvinic word for "donkey" is "isme", where the initial vowel is neither original "a" nor the less common "o" variant, and where the nasal has become "m" instead of "n". But it must reflect the same Crescentine origin.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it first had a "u" like Permic, and it was pulled forward to "i" by the following front-ish consonant "s". The "m" instead of "n" is probably a contamination from, or application of, the native Uralic suffix "-ma", which is used to coin nouns, including from noun roots. That is, "donkey" is "horse + thing".
In Finnish it's "aasi", which Wiktionary says is borrowed from a Germanic word which ultimately borrowed the Latin "asinus". Likewise for Northern Sami "asen". However, given the Crescentine origin of the root and suffix, it's worth seeing if these are from the Crescentine substrate in F-V-land, rather than borrowings via Latin and Germanic. IDK enough about Finnic and Sami to weigh in on that, just noting it's worth investigating.
For now, though, note that the Finnish word lacks "n", even though the supposed Swedish donor does have "n", "asne" / "asni", as in Latin "asinus". This would require metathesis of "sn" -> "ns", deletion of "n", and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel to "aa", to yield "aasi". Maybe these are well-known processes in Finnish, but perhaps it just reflects the Crescentine substrate word "ašɜ", phonetically without the "n" suffix, and semantically narrowed in Finnic to mean "donkey" rather than "horse".
BTW, another way to see that the Mari and Permic words do *not* have the Crescentine suffix "na", and therefore mean "horse" rather than "horse-like" (i.e. "donkey"), is that the "na" suffix appears in a whole bunch of flora & fauna words in the F-V substrate. And when it's preceded by "š", "n" hardens into "t" in Mari.
ReplyDeleteE.g., "päkšnä" -> "pistə" ("linden tree"), "wešnä" -> "wistə" ("spelt"), and "śäśnä" -> "šištǝ" ("woodpecker").
Yet this did not happen in Mari's reflex of "ašɜ", which is "ožə̑" -- no "t" or any consonant after the sibilant. So the "na" suffix was not there, and it meant "horse", not "in the same family as horse" i.e. "donkey".
This also means that the F-V substrate words ending in "na" have Crescentine roots with the phonetic material preceding "na", and "na" is used to mean "in the same family as". So, "wheat" vs. "related to wheat", or "linden" vs. "related to linden", and so on.
Zooming out to the big picture, we see clear linguistic evidence for the presence of horses and donkeys in Finno-Volga-land, back when Crescentine languages were still spoken there, during the Copper Age (Cucuteni and similar cultures). Moreover, at some point they were tamed and domesticated, while Crescentine was still spoken -- shown by the gendered pair of words, instead of a single genderless term for wild species.
ReplyDeleteNone of these words were borrowed from Proto-Indo-European, whose (late, geographically restricted) term for "mare" = "markos" is borrowed from an Eastern Steppe language. That means that the breeding of horses pre-dates the Yamnaya and other Indo-Euro-like cultures in the Western Steppe, even if some Indo-Euro cultures elevated the horse to greater heights than the Cucuteni-like cultures of Danubian / Old Europe.
The Danubian cultures were not nomadic pastoralist raiders, they bred horses and donkeys as beasts of burden for their mainly agrarian economy, with some livestock. That's also why they coined a word for donkey, which did not show up in Indo-Euro languages until millennia later -- it's not exactly the steed of choice for prehistoric biker gangs! But very useful to sedentary farmer folk. ^_^
Only after Indo-Euro languages spread to the sedentary agrarian economies of the Eastern Mediterranean, did a word for "donkey" enter the I-E family -- and even then, it was carried over from the Crescentine substrate in those places. They didn't stop sedentary agriculture just cuz they switched languages to I-E, they didn't stop using donkeys, and they said why bother changing our word for donkey, since Indo-Euro does not have such a word anyway. And so the Crescentine word for "donkey" persisted after their language change to I-E (or to Semitic, in the Arabian Peninsula).
You hear so much about the historical, cultural, economic, and military importance of horses -- now, by peeling back the layers of history to a pre-pastoralist era, we can give the donkey its due too. ^_^
There are a few horse-girl animes and vtubers -- why not a donkey-girl? Maybe there's a cave painting from Cucuteni somewhere depicting a donkey-girl... later, a human turning into a donkey was pejorative, just like the name "jackass" in English. But in pre-pastoralist times, maybe it wasn't so bad -- the cute, humble little horse-like "asna". ^_^
In a horse-centric world, it takes a true ass appreciator to give the donkey its due.
ReplyDeleteTocharian and Sanskrit have similar words for "donkey", whose borrowed roots are from an Eastern Steppe language's word for "horse". Turning to the eastern Indo-Euro languages, which actually spent some time on the Eastern Steppe, they don't have anything related to "asna" as in the West, which reflects Crescentine influence. So it's worth looking to Eastern loan sources.
ReplyDeleteThe Proto-Tocharian word is "kercäpā", and Sanskrit "gardabha".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Tocharian/kerc%C3%A4p%C4%81
Adams says the Tocharian word must've borrowed from a very early form of Proto-Indo-Iranian, before the "e" and "o" of P-IE were lowered into "a" in I-I.
That gets the chronology wrong -- Tocharian, especially P-Tocharian, is the 2nd-oldest branch of I-E, after only Anatolian. Indo-Iranian is younger.
Also the geography is wrong for that scenario -- P-T formed in the Altai-Sayan region, before they passed through the mountain pass and headed south into the Tarim Basin, whereas the earliest stage of P-II is way over west of the Ural Mountains and a bit north of the Steppe as well (Sintashta culture, or earlier).
Rather, both Tocharian and Indo-Iranian came into contact with an Eastern Steppe group that had a word for "horse", which both I-E languages borrowed separately. They then appended an Indo-Euro suffix which is a generic animal word ending -- "bho" in P-IE -- as noted by Adams. Semantically, it's "horse + creature", and since a literal horse would have no suffix or compound, this means "creature with the attribute of being like a horse", namely a donkey.
It's also possible that since the word only goes back to Sanskrit rather than P-Indo-Aryan, and has no cognates in the entire Iranian branch, Sanskrit borrowed it from Tocharian, and there was only one meeting on the Eastern Steppe, between Tocharian and the mystery group.
Who was that local culture? I dunno exactly, but Chuvash has a word for "mare" which is "kĕsre". It's a Turkic language, the only surviving member of the oldest Turkic branch, Oghur. However, this word has no Turkic roots. Chuvash people used to speak a Uralic language of the region, probably Mari, but this word also has no Mari, Samoyedic, or other Uralic origin.
The most plausible source for the Chuvash word is Yeniseian, whose P-Y word for "horse" is "kus", which is *not* borrowed from P-IE "gʷṓws" = "cattle", BTW, more on that later. The southern Yeniseian language Arin also has a form meaning "mare", with an additional vowel at the end, "qúše". I don't know how the Chuvash "r" fits into the derivation, but this is the only plausible path.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/kus
Regardless of where the Chuvash word came from, it at least shows that there was a horse word in the central-to-eastern Steppe, "kĕsre", that looks like the root of the Tocharian word for donkey, "kercä-", with metathesis of the medial consonants (IDK which is original).
So this is where the Tocharian word for donkey came from -- an Eastern Steppe word for "horse", with an Indo-Euro "critter / creature" suffix tacked on. Same basic morphology as elsewhere -- the defining trait of a donkey is not its size, color, behavior, voice, etc., but the likeness to a horse. So base it off of a word for horse, with some generic suffix tacked on to indicate it's "like" a horse, but not exactly a horse.
Tocharian has a standalone word for "horse", derived from P-IE, but it didn't use this as the basis for "donkey". Why not? Maybe as former Samoyedic speakers, the Tocharians had this Eastern Steppe word floating around in their Pre-Tocharian substrate, and decided to preserve it, but only in a compound relating to donkeys rather than horses per se.
The main point is that donkeys were not important to Indo-Europeans, they either borrowed the entire word for donkey, or the root of it (horse), from non-IE languages, whether Crescentine in the West or Yeniseian, Uralic, etc. in the East.
ReplyDeleteAs for the P-IE word for "horse", that looks like it was borrowed from Yeniseian too. Not my discovery, but Blažek's, who proposes P-Y "ʔɨʔχ + kuʔs" = "male + horse".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%81%C3%A9%E1%B8%B1wos
Wiktionary notes the phonetic and morphological implausibilities involved in trying to derive the word for "horse" from a word relating to "swift" or "swiftness", using native I-E roots and morphology. Also, that the Anatolian form points to original "u" for the 2nd vowel, which makes it an even closer fit with Yeniseian "kus".
This makes sense in terms of who domesticated the horse -- the Botai culture or other Eastern Steppe group, not the West -- and which way the headwinds blow, especially relating to the Steppe and horse culture, namely from East to West, not vice versa.
This also allows us to rule out the idea that P-Y "kus" is from P-IE "gʷṓws". Semantically, horses and cattle are different species, although still major livestock, but not a perfect match. Phonetically, P-Y has labialized velar consonants, so there's no need to de-labialize "gʷ". Within the history of Yeniseian, de-labialization meant turning into a labial stop, not removing the labial feature and keeping it velar. And P-Y is fine with coda "w", so no need to remove that either.
And chronologically it's impossible -- "gʷṓws" and "h₁éḱus" are both in P-IE at the earliest stage, with Anatolian and Tocharian reflexes. Since P-Y "kus" is the best plausible source of P-IE "h₁éḱus", the loan from "gʷṓws" -> "kus" and then back from "kus" -> "h₁éḱus" would have to travel backwards in time, since both P-IE words existed at the same early stage.
So, Indo-Euro did not borrow "horse" from sedentary Crescentine, who pioneered using horses as work animals, but from a fellow semi-nomadic Steppe culture, who pioneered horsemanship, in the East.
Crescentine donated its word for "horse" to Northern Caucasian languages. Final stop on this journey, hopefully. The entry on P-IE "h₁éḱus" discusses, and rules out, a theory that it was adopted from Northern Caucasian languages. I agree these two groups are not related, but it turns out the Northern Caucasian horse words are loans from Crescentine -- or perhaps a Crescentine substrate underneath these languages (doubtful, but you never know).
ReplyDeleteThe five examples given are "šə", "aĉə", "ču", "ičva" ("mare"), and "šiv".
All 3 families of Caucasus languages, and P-Indo-Euro for that matter, ban words with initial vowels. They have a zillion consonants to choose from, so it's usually no problem -- unless it's a loan from a language that does allow initial vowels. Crescentine is just such a family, making it very unlike the surrounding families.
Since the preference against initial vowels is so strong, the presence of initial vowels in 2 of the 5 examples is proof that they're original -- there's every reason *not* to add an initial vowel that was originally not there. One vowel is "a", the other is "i" but next to palatal "č" and so possibly assimilating for place there. The final vowels are all over, hard to tell.
The medial consonant is a post-alveolar sibilant or affricate.
In other words, a perfect reflection of Crescentine "ašɜ". Again, we can rule out the opposite direct of loaning, since Caucasian native words don't begin with vowels, while Crescentine words can. Some Caucasian borrowings kept the initial vowel, others zapped it as expected.
The Crescentine word is attested in the substrates of Finno-Volga-land and Anatolia, not to mention Sumeria. So, it's plausible geographically. Chronologically, I'm assuming it entered NW Caucasian during the Maykop culture, which lasted during the 4th millennium BC. The "donkey" word in Sumerian, "anše" is recorded in writing around 3200-3000 BC, so it must have existed well before then, especially to connect back to the more distant forms in Finno-Volga-land, Italy, the Balkans, Anatolia, etc. So the timing works.
The only puzzle is -- why didn't Northern Caucasians borrow the word for "horse" from Indo-Euros, or some Eastern Steppe culture? I think it was cultural similarity -- both the Indo-Euros and the Eastern Steppe cultures were semi-nomadic pastoralists, so they shared a word (from East to West, founder vs. later adopter).
The Maykop culture was sedentary and agrarian, though, with terraces cut into the mountains to do crop cultivation, and living in dense permanent settlements, like other civilizations. So they looked not to the roaming Indo-Euros or Eastern Steppe cultures, but to the nearest sedentary civilization, the Crescentines. Their use of the horse was shared as well -- not as a prehistoric motorcycle for riding and raiding, but as a work animal for settled farmers.
The Caucasus Mountains are the LAST place in the world where you can roam around on horses like a biker gang just cruising around, up to no good. The terrain is too steep and rugged, the opposite of a flat wide-open Steppe. Unlike pastoralist language families, which can get spread far and wide, mountain-people languages tend to be small and not spread. Why, just in the Caucasus, there are 3 separate families! That's cuz mountains impede movement, so people tend to hang out where they were born and grew up, unlike nomads from a steppe or desert environment, who can roam far and wide from where they were born.
Transhumance pastoralism, where hill / mountain people follow an annual circuit between mountaintops in summer and valleys in winter, is not nomadic, and does not take them far and wide. And there's a permanent home base, not movable tents. So it's natural for them to affiliate with sedentary civilizations, as opposed to nomads.
Man, that Crescentine word for "horse" got around even more than I thought at first! That's the inventor's advantage -- he who first used horses and donkeys for farm work, gets to spread his word for these species around to whoever else wants them to use for those purposes as well. Just like he who first began riding horses gets to spread his word for horse around to other aspiring horse-riders.
ReplyDeleteBTW, about the Semitic word for "female donkey" = "ʔatān", those interdental fricatives in NW Semitic may be part of their general trend of fricativizing ("spirantizing") stops after vowels, rather than blending the "l" and "t" of the Crescentine substrate word, similar to "ältɜ" from F-V-land.
ReplyDeleteThe point remains, though -- "ʔatān" comes from "ältɜ" rather than "ašɜ", since both have "t". In the 3-consonant root structure of Semitic, the 1st is wasted on the glottal stop, which is needed to prevent a vowel-initial word. The 3rd reflects the Crescentine suffix "na". That only leaves one consonant, the 2nd, to reflect the sequence "lt" from the source.
Easiest way to do that is delete one and keep the other. Why keep "t" instead of "l"? Possibly for prosodic reasons -- in "ʔatān", the "t" is the onset of a syllable, just like the "t" in "ältɜ", whose "l" would fit better as a coda consonant in a borrowing.
One more horse word from the Eastern Steppe, to correct the Turkocentric school, which is similar to the Indo-Euro-centric school. There's no Uralo-centric school or Crescentine-centric school -- that's why they're likely to be a goldmine, and why I'm so busy in those mines, rather than trying to shoehorn everything into Indo-Euro or Turkic.
ReplyDeleteProto-Samoyedic, the oldest branch of Uralic (or Emishi / Ainu) and spoken in the Altai-Sayan region, has a word for "horse" = "juntå", which Wiktionary says is borrowed from "Proto"-Turkic "yunt".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/junt%C3%A5
This direction, from Turkic to Samoyedic, can be ruled out on chronological grounds, since Samoyedic is way older, dating back to 1000, 2000, 3000 BC or so, whereas Turkic arose during the 1st millennium AD, as a creole of Uralic and Yeniseian, and reflecting the polyglot confederation of the Xiongnu and similar Eastern Steppe empires of the late 1st millennium BC.
Phonotactically, "nt" is banned in Proto-Turkic roots, and so is "nd" for that matter. They can appear medially in a compound, or in a few loanwords, like this one from Samoyedic, and "ānt" = "oath", which is the only P-T word that ends in "nt" with no vowel afterward. Mongolian and Tungusic have a word "anda" meaning "blood-brother" and "friend", which must be related to the Turkic word for "oath", phonetically and semantically. Proto-Mongolic also bans "nt" and "nd", so it's not from there. Likewise Proto-Tungusic, apart from a compound form or a borrowing / substrate word for "hare" and "fur boots".
I easily discovered the source of the "anda" word in Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic -- it's from Samoyedic, which like all Uralic branches *does* allow "nt" or "nd" (in languages where voiced obstruents developed). It's a borrowing from P-Samoyedic "aŋtə", whose reflex is "ändä" in Mator, which was spoken in the northern Sayan Mountains. It means "blade; edge", and must refer to some ceremonial act of using a blade to swear a blood oath to create blood-brothers -- like slicing your palm and sticking your bloody palms together.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/a%C5%8Bt%C9%99
See how easy it is, when you don't think Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were spoken before the 1st millennium AD, and when you see Samoyedic and Uralic as far more ancient languages, which were spoken all across the Steppe, not just extreme northern forest zones like they are today?
So, the Samoyedic word for "horse" is original, and some branches of Turkic borrowed it (and even then, not the oldest branch, Oghur).
Since "yunt" is not native to Turkic, it cannot be explained by smaller Turkic roots. What about in Samoyedic? There are several vowel-alternated words in P-S that relate to horses, and may be the source of the word for horse.
There are two archery words, connecting archers to the horses they ride in the Eastern Steppe: "jäntə" = "bow-string" and "jïntə" = "bow".
And two words relating to "notice" or perhaps "warning", and "listen" or perhaps "heed": "jüntə" = "notice" and "jüntə-" = "to hear, listen to". This alludes to horses as making lots of noise when an entire gang of horse-riders are storming through the neighborhood, impossible to ignore their noise -- like a biker gang revving up their engines and being heard miles away. And the fact that this noise is a notice or warning to anyone hearing it -- beware, biker gang coming through, prepare accordingly.
Notably, the Samoyedic word for "horse" does not describe the animal itself, but the type of person who rides on it -- horse-riding gangs whose trampling warning-noise is heard for miles away, and who use bows while riding their horses in a form of drive-by shooting.
ReplyDeleteIn the Eastern Steppe, horses were used for riding, rather than as work animals, so early that P-S didn't even think of the horses as an independent kind of animal with its particular animal traits like galloping, neighing, and so on -- but first and foremost, as the vehicle of choice for nomadic gangs of archers.
Not only were horses first domesticated in the East, they were ridden first in the East, and used as a vehicle for shooters first in the East.
Anyone trying to sell the image of any branch of Indo-Europeans as nomadic horse-riding archers from the Steppe, is indulging in flagrant "we wuz kangs"-level LARP-ing. Sorry, that honor belongs to the Uralic and Yeniseian speakers, and their later creole cultures who speak Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic -- and their farthest-eastern off-shoot, Glorious Nippon. ^_^
The closest that Indo-Euros came to using horses for warfare on the Steppe was Proto-Indo-Iranians pioneering chariot warfare, but that practice only lasted for a nanosecond, and did not dominate the Steppe like riding on top of the horses and shooting on horseback. Chariots were too burdened by their origin in using horses as draft animals for non-militaristic vehicles like wagons and ploughs.
It was the best adapation to Steppe conditions, that Indo-Europeans could manage, given their background as using horses and cows as work animals and not being archers by nature. But the vehicles require too much maintenance, do not repair themselves, do not move themselves, etc. They already have horses pulling them -- why not eliminate the wagon, and just ride on the horse directly? That's the superior strategy, and chariot warfare went the way of the gravity bombs in the era of anti-air and drone warfare.
I'll get more into this topic later, but to emphasize how fleeting the Indo-Iranian chariot era was -- they were on the Steppe during a phase of the "nomads vs. central state" cycle where nomads were weak. This cycle lasts 2000 years, 1000 years in each direction. It was equivalent to the Classical era, not the Dark Ages or the Bronze Age, when nomadic raiders whooped everyone's asses.
Indo-Iranian migration via chariot warfare took place after the earlier nomad-dominant phase, which sent the Indo-Europeans fleeing from the Western Steppe into NE Europe (Corded Ware refugees), and the succeeding nomad-dominant era of the Bronze Age, whose collapse was brought about by nomadic raiders of various types, including the Sea Peoples.
By the time the Bronze Age began, and nomadic raiders enjoyed another round of success, the Indo-Iranians fought a valiant fight at the Sayan Mountains, but then quit while they were ahead, turned south into the Hindu Kush and Iranian Plateau fortresses, and never returned to the Steppe again. Indo-Euros are no match for Altai-Sayan nomads.
The same will happen / is already happening for Russians moving eastward. They have already lost Kazakhstan when the Russian Empire collapsed, they never did have Mongolia even at their peak, and it's likely that circa 2300 when the Neo-Dark Ages begin in earnest, they will lose what they have of Manchuria and zones just north of the Steppe as well, certainly in the far east like near the Sayan Mountains and Lake Baikal.
Even re-integrating the Western Steppe (Ukraine) requires prolonged warfare, in a central state-dominant era. You can imagine how much worse it will be in the Eastern Steppe when the nomad-dominant phase begins in only a few centuries...
Also, wagons / chariots don't build themselves or multiply themselves -- unlike an animal species like the horse, which is already required for chariots to function anyway.
ReplyDeleteChariot schmariot -- it's called riding on horseback, you Aryan slave! Remember, the Indo-Iranian endonym "Arya" entered Uralic languages with the meaning "slave, servant", not "master, lord, or badass warrior".
Don't bother jockeying for position on the Steppe, until your women can perform feats like this Altaic baddie. ^_^
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/hcgewb/acrobatic_archer_in_world_nomad_games_kyrgyzstan/
In fairness to Iranians, they have never thought of themselves as nomadic horse-riding archers from the Steppe, but as inheritors of sedentary agrarian civilizations from the Fertile Crescent through the Indus Valley region. Same with Indo-Aryans, who may talk about charioteers invading India, but not horse-riding archers.
ReplyDeleteThis fan-fiction about Iranian horse-riding archer nomads was only cooked up in the late 19th C, by peripheral ethnic groups in the collapsing Euro empires -- especially those from the Austrian Empire, not Austrians themselves, but West Slavs and Hungarians. And the Balts, too. And Ukrainians. Russians and Austrians and Germans, in the core of their empires, weren't so crazy.
It was mainly these peripheral ethnicities who felt their sense of cultural identity collapsing, and had to look for an anchor outside -- and in the wake of the discovery of Indo-European languages, they latched on to something exotic yet familiar, Iranians / Aryans.
Nobody anywhere before then said the Scythians or such groups were Iranian or Indo-Euro, in fact Herodotus says they didn't speak a language like the Persians, Medes, and other Iranians, nor like the Greeks or Anatolians (and he would know -- he was a Carian himself), and so on.
When the Huns and Turks and Magyars and Mongols showed up during the Dark Ages, they were likened by contemporary observers only to Scythians and Sarmatians -- not Indo-Euro groups like the Iranians of any kind, Greeks, Armenians, Anatolians, or the newly emerging Slavs, nor even to the Vikings, who were also nomadic but clearly not from the Eastern Steppe.
This whole fanfic about Iranian Steppe horse-riding nomads is just a cope to prop up the collapsing cultural identity of people in non-Iranian collapsing empires. It happened in the late 19th C in Europe, and it'll happen again in America now.
It is not coming from Iranians of any branch themselves, who never look to any imaginary barbarian nomadic past, but a long history of civilizations -- and if anything, being conquered by Eastern Steppe horse-riding nomads.
Even there, they emphasize how the Eastern Steppe peoples like the Seljuks, or the Parthians before them, were slowly incorporated and enculturated in the Iranian mainstream culture. First they were allowed in the military as foreign mercenaries, prized for their horsemanship and archery. Then they rise through the military ranks, and perhaps serve as the new elite when the old native Iranian empire collapses, just like the Parthians after the Achaemenids collapsed, or the Seljuk Turks after the Iranian proxies of the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed.
The whole Turko-Persian fusion thing, they really pride themselves on that -- taming, domesticating, sedentarizing, and culturally refining the wild horse-riding nomads from the Altai Mountains. It was no different during the Parthian era. It will be no different after 2300, when nomads become dominant again, and Iran will have to fight fire with fire by hiring Turkic horse archers, who rise through the ranks and eventually take over after the native Iranian dynasty collapses.
They've seen it a million times before, and they'll see it a million times again.
Herodotus describes the Scythian Eastern Steppe blood-brother ritual in detail, BTW. From IV.70:
ReplyDelete"In the following manner the Scythians make oaths to whomsoever they make them: they pour wine into a great earthenware cup and mingle with it blood of those who are taking the oath to one another, either making a prick with an awl or cutting with a dagger a little way into their body, and then they dip into the cup a sword and arrows and a battle-axe and a javelin; and having done this, they invoke many curses on the breaker of the oath, and afterwards they drink it off, both they who are making the oath and the most honourable of their company."
This is the exact same as the Turkic "ant" and Mongolic "anda" blood-brother oath ritual, although these latter two may use kumiss instead of / in addition to wine. There is no such identical ritual in the Western Steppe, or in any off-shoot of the Indo-Euros. It's a shibboleth of the Altai-Sayan region, and firmly anchors the Scythians as an Eastern Steppe culture in origin -- although they were driven westward by a typical chain reaction across the Steppe.
But now we can see the linguistic angle as well, not just the similarity of the ritual to later Turkic and Mongolic rituals. The later ones use a Samoyedic word for "blade" to refer to the ritual oath, and the blood-brothers it produces. This is cuz they use a blade to cut themselves in order to drip blood into the drinking bowl -- as well as then dipping the blade of their sword into the mixture. "Blade" has a doubly important meaning to this ritual.
I'm sure that the term "anta / anda" was already being used for this ritual purpose when everyone in the region spoke Samoyedic, since that's when its meaning would have been transparent to the oath-swearers. Then it was carried over when they created their new creole languages, Turkic and Mongolic (and Tungusic). It was a sacred ritual -- why get rid of the name? They no longer used it to mean "blade", but they had to keep it in its ritualistic use, for the blade-related oath -- even if now they no longer understood its etymology.
Sadly, Herodotus doesn't say what the Scythian word was for this ritual, or for the blood-brothers it produced. They spoke a Mordvinic language, not Samoyedic, so maybe it was based on the Mordvinic word for "sword", which is "toro". Or if the Samoyedic cultures invented this ritual, maybe the Scythians borrowed the original term from their Uralic cousins to the east, "anta / anda".
At any rate, a topical reminder that the Scythians were an Eastern Steppe culture. Technically, from the Central Steppe, but anything to the east of the Yamnaya homeland is Eastern. Some of their descendants still speak Mordvinic, others have switched to Turkic and adopted a Tatar identity, just like their cousins in the Sayan Mountains.
The Uralic nomads the Magyars also practiced that blood-letting and blood-drinking oath, according to the Gesta Hungarorum, the first major chronicle written about them circa 1200, but referring to their 9th-C rise to power.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_oath_(Hungarians)
This version doesn't involve dipping any weapons into the blood container, so I don't think they're just recycling Herodotus' story about the Scythians. And the container is called a chalice rather than an earthenware bowl.
Of course, everyone said the Magyars were the descendants of the Scythians and were from Scythia -- more proof that Scythians were Uralic. The Magyars spoke a different branch of Uralic, Ugric, but it's not so far away from Mordvinic.
Were there blood oaths in the Wa, Yamato, or Glorious Nippon? Yes, but not with all elements integrated into a single ritual like the Scythians, Magyars, Turks, and Mongols. Perhaps by the time the Wa settled into the Japanese islands, the original ritual had fractured into several rituals, due to the lack of neighboring cultures who could have reinforced the tradition as a single intense integrated ritual.
ReplyDeleteThey did invoke curses from the gods if they broke their oath -- typical for any culture, though.
They did cut their finger with a blade to draw blood, and used that bloody fingerprint to sign or seal a written oath (keppan). This began in the Kamakura and later periods, mainly among the samurai, pledging loyalty.
The Yakuza perform a sake-cup ceremony (sakazuki), where they share sake from each other's cups, but blood is not involved in any way.
...However, in one of the many cases of Japanese people re-inventing their Altai-Sayan ancestral culture from first principles, there are several Yakuza movies that *do* involve cutting oneself to drip blood into the sake cup during the ceremony. One even has this in the title -- the 1969 movie "Yakuza hijoshi: Chi no sakazuki", where the sub-title means "blood sake-cups" or "sake-cups of blood". English title: "Fill the Cup with Blood".
Somewhere in the folktales or legendary stories that Japanese people tell each other, perhaps outside of recorded media, the customs of the Altai-Sayan region are still being passed down through the generations, even after leaving Lake Baikal, Manchuria, and Korea long behind them.
That's just not something that you come up with out of pure imagination. Somewhere in the hazy background folklore of Japan, are details about ritual blood-letting into a cup, and sharing the drink to cement a lifelong bond among people who aren't already related by blood.
You can take the Wa out of the Altai, but you can't take the Altai out of the Wa. ^_^
Final note: there's no such thing as genetic memory or "ancestral" memory, that's just another genetic determinist cope for people whose cultural identity is collapsing along with their empire. If somehow they can only get their genes into the future, then their culture will survive as well. Or if they don't care about the future, at least they're rooted in an unbroken chain to their ancestral culture -- merely by carrying certain packets of genes.
ReplyDeleteSorry, dork, that's not how culture works. It must be passed along through cultural transmission. Genes transmit no part of culture, whether language, religion, dancing and music styles, or legends, myths, and stories. Or grudges against enemies, which are part of stories and legends.
I said these Altai-Sayan-like rituals are still alive in Japanese memory cuz somebody somewhere is actively telling stories with these details in them, and someone who heard them has told someone else, who has told someone else... up until the present, where a Yakuza movie is made with the title directly referring to the Altai-Sayan blood-letting-and-drinking oath ritual, despite it no longer being practiced in that fully integrated form in Japan.
Genes didn't encode any of those narrative details -- words, phrases, sentences, and stories did. They were not passed on to future generations through conception, birth, and upbringing -- storytellers telling stories to audiences did.
If a culture does not actively transmit itself to the next generation, it dies. Maybe others will preserve it in a Noah's Ark -- which Japan is doing for the best of American culture -- but without active transmission, it reaches the end of the line for itself.
Genes do not encode culture, store culture, transmit culture, or anything like that. Only cultural processes do -- like telling and listening to stories, making music and dancing along to it, speaking and acquiring language, and so on.
Enough with the genetic reductionist cope already.
Saiga antelope from the Steppe has name with Samoyedic root and Turkic suffix. Looking more into the Samoyedic roots of Turkic (and the other parent of the creole being Yeniseian), I came across the name of an antelope from the Steppe, with comically bloated nostrils -- called "saiga" in English. This is borrowed (via Russian) from the Kipchak Turkic name "saygak". Kipchak is the Northwest branch of Turkic, spread by Turkic tribes who ventured straight westward across the Steppe, including Kazakh and Kyrgyz.
ReplyDeleteThe Wiktionary article on "saygak" is listed under Proto-Turkic, but this is just a case of Turko-centric delusion, very similar to Indo-Euro-centric delusion. And someone at Wiktionary put a warning on the article, saying it's only attested in certain languages from the Kipchak branch, not all the way back to Proto-Turkic.
The same applies for the root of this name, "say", which means "to pierce". This is only found in the Kipchak branch, not P-T.
However, the generic suffix "-gak" does go back to P-T, and attaches to verbs to form a noun.
So where does the verb root "say" come from, if not native Turkic roots? Why, from Samoyedic! There's a very productive root in P-S to "sew", which involves piercing. The verb "såjtə" comes from P-Uralic "śolte", so this is a native Uralic word in Samoyedic, not a borrowing. Related words are "såjtoń" = "seam" and another verb "såjtor" meaning "to sew". These have reflexes in the southern range of Samoyedic, not just northern forest zones.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/s%C3%A5jt%C9%99-
P-T does not allow a sequence of "tg" unless the preceding phoneme is a short vowel. In the Samoyedic root, the "t" is preceded by a coda glide "j" ("y" in Turkic) and a vowel. So when Samoyedic speakers switched to Turkic, they couldn't carry over this root as "sayt-" in order to form "sayt + gak". They had to delete something, and they chose the "t", since "tg" is rare and must not sound good. Hence, "say" meaning "to pierce".
This same Samoyedic root was carried over into other branches of Turkic, Oghuz and Siberian, to coin a verb for "to roll up the sleeves or cuffs", "sïtga". Here, "-ga" is a P-T suffix that attaches to a noun and produces a verb. So, "sït" must be a noun related to the cuffs or sleeves. This comes from the same P-S root, one of whose derivatives is "seam". But the P-S word for "seam" is way too long, "såjtoń", to serve as the noun that the suffix "-ga" attaches to. It should be of shape CVC.
Whereas Kipchak chopped "såjt" down to "say", Oghuz and Siberian Turkic deleted the back vowel "å", vocalized the "j" into "i" -- but to preserve the back-ness of the deleted adjacent vowel, shifted this back to "ï" -- and kept "t", yielding "sït" = "seam". Attaching the verb-forming suffix "-ga", they coined "sïtga" = "to do something with the seam", i.e. "to roll up the cuffs or sleeves".
Because these Turkic words don't have an "l" like the P-Uralic root does, it points specifically to a Samoyedic origin, where the "l" of P-U was changed to "j". Well, sure, Samoyedic is later than P-U, and Turkic is a young family, so it would have been based on a later stage of Uralic, not P-U. And Samoyedic is a far east branch of Uralic, in the same region where Turkic was born, in the Altai-Sayan region.
There must be a major overhaul of Turkic historical linguistics, to clear away all the Turko-centric shoe-horning. Much of the lexicon of Turkic languages -- whether P-T or descendant branches -- is likely to come from Samoyedic, which these cultures spoke before the birth of the Turkic family, which is a creole of Samoyedic and Yeniseian.
ReplyDeleteAnd since Turkic is further west than its Altaic cousin Mongolic, the role for Samoyedic will be greater in Turkic, since Samoyedic is further west than Yeniseian. Conversely, the creole that became Mongolic will show a greater influence from the Yeniseian side. And the creole that became Tungusic will show greater influence from the Amuric / Nivkh side, along with Uralic / Samoyedic.
All three Altaic languages formed as creoles from the diverse mix of languages from the polyglot Eastern Steppe nomad empires of the late 1st millennium BC, e.g. the Xiongnu, after those confederations collapsed and successor cultures were synthesized in their wake.
For that matter, the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian language of Proto-Japonic shows Uralic influence as well, and the Wa were part of those Steppe confederations as well. Heavily agglutinative, suffixing, residual vowel harmony, no / rare voiced obstruents, and some lexical borrowing in both directions.
This Steppe Uralic influence was only strengthened when the Wa incorporated speakers of Emishi / Ainu languages, which is the furthest-east branch of Uralic. I know, I still have to post on that, I still have my 10 pages of notes, haven't forgotten about it...
BTW, the root about "sew, pierce" relates to the prominent horns of the antelope.
ReplyDeleteWhy does Japonic show less Uralic influence than Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic? Cuz the Wa didn't hang out on the Steppe after the break-up of the Xiongnu and similar confederations -- they migrated off of the Steppe, first south into Korea, then across the water into the Japanese islands.
ReplyDeleteSo, Japonic had over 500 years of linguistic isolation from the homeland of Uralic / Samoyedic, whereas Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic stayed more or less where they were from, and kept absorbing Uralic influences that entire time.
True, Emishi / Ainu being Uralic contributed some continued Uralic influence on Japonic, even inside Japan, but the Ainu language was from a subordinate culture that was assimilating into the Wa. So there was not as much pressure on the Wa to absorb Uralic influences.
Contrast that with the Steppe, where one of the major cultural influencers spoke Uralic in the 1st millennium BC -- the Scythians. And 1000 years later, the Magyars. Plus, the Eastern Steppe is the homeland of Uralic, so its influence will be more inertial there, compared to the distant eastern off-shoot of Ainu spoken in Japan, in relative isolation.
Therefore, Japonic kept much more of its Wa-Dene-Yeniseian predecessor by leaving the Steppe, unlike Mongolic, which also must have had a heavy Yeniseian predecessor influence, but which also absorbed heavy Uralic influence by remaining near the Altai-Sayan region.
Something similar must be going on with Korean. They don't seem to have been from the Steppe, but from the Amur region, and probably spoke Nivkh rather than Yeniseian. Maybe it was something further to the northeast, like Chukotko-Kamchatkan, who knows?
But unlike Tungusic, which also has a Nivkh background, Koreans settled into the Korean peninsula, away from the heavy Uralic influence of the Steppe. Uralic did exert influence in the east, which shows up in Tungusic, but it's weaker the farther you get from the Altai-Sayan region. Koreans probably absorbed a small amount of Emishi / Ainu speakers, just like Japonic did, but not so much cuz the Ainu were mainly based in Japan, not Korea -- probably just the southern tip near Japan.
And yet, they still had some Steppe nomad empire background, since the founders of the Kim clan from Silla and Gaya explicitly claim descent from the Xiongnu.
But like Glorious Nippon, Korea spent much of its history away from the Steppe after a southward migration, and became a linguistic "hermit kingdom".
The general phonotactic rule that prevents Turkic from using "sayt" before a suffix beginning with a consonant, is that syllables must be of shape (C)V(V)(C). No coda clusters allowed. Also the VV must be a single long vowel, not diphthong, so they can't make "sayt" into "sait". CVC is preferred over CVVC.
ReplyDeleteBotai culture, 1st horse tamers, spoke Yeniseian, called it "the strong one". One final Eastern Steppe horse word -- going all the way back to the origin of horse domestication, at the Botai culture:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botai_culture
The same Blažek who said P-IE got their word for "horse" from Yeniseian, also suggests that the Botai culture spoke Yeniseian, so that the Indo-Euros got the word straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, and not from Yeniseian speakers further to the east, where they're more historically attested along the Yenisei River.
If true, that would make Botai the westernmost group of Yeniseian (or Wa-Dene-Yeniseian) speakers.
The Proto-Ugric language, part of Uralic and lying due north of where the Botai flourished, has a word for "horse" that doesn't look like many other languages' words for "horse". It's reconstructed as "luwɜ" or "luγǝ".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1794
The Uralonet entry notes potential connections to Finnish "lupo" = "mare", Latvian "lops" = "livestock", and Albanian "lopë" = "cow".
I didn't think of Yeniseian as being spoken so far west -- but then, I didn't think of Ainu being Uralic until I looked into it. With this helpful lead, I easily discovered the origin and meaning of the Ugric and other potentially connected words. It is indeed Yeniseian, and it means "the strong one" or "the firm one" or maybe "the willful, stubborn, difficult-to-master one", and so on.
It is assembled as "ɬaw + Vŋʷ (+ ja?)", where V is too variable to pin down, and sometimes deleted altogether.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/%C9%ACaw
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/-V%C5%8B%CA%B7
The root "ɬaw" has to do with "protrusion, extension", but it's a semantically versatile root. In Yug, it is given the suffix "-Vŋʷ", whose reflex is "lʲaŋ" = "strong, firm" (noun and action nominal, so "strength" or "the act of being strong").
This suffix also produces an adjective, based on the root it attaches to, hence the gloss of "strong, firm".
I include the possible generic noun suffix "-ja" from P-Y, which means "thing, the one, etc.", in case that's where the final vowel is coming from. And semantically it makes the adjective into a noun -- "the one that is strong / firm / stubborn / willful / has a mind of its own".
Semantically, it's a very plausible description of a wild horse, to the people who are just beginning to tame and domesticate them. What species is more typical of "wild" and "untamed" than the horse? We use that species in English as well -- "wild horses couldn't..." to mean it's so difficult not even the most stubborn, willful, and physically strong species in existence, could do the job.
ReplyDeletePhonetically, neither Uralic nor Indo-Euro have the lateral fricative, so they made it the approximant "l". Some languages in Ugric kept "aw", others made it a single back-round vowel, which is typical. If there was a V in the suffix, it was likely deleted altogether.
The "ŋʷ" also does not exist in Uralic or Indo-Euro, and is very exotic and problematic for them. Imagine, two of the most distinctly Yeniseian consonants -- and this word has them as the only consonants!
One solution is to make the labialization feature into a primary "w" glide. Another is to make the labial feature on a velar consonant into a primary labial stop, i.e. "p". Also pretty typical (though usually that's from a velar stop or fricative, not nasal -- but still plausible).
Another is to harden the nasal into a fricative, while preserving velar location, voicing, and non-stop manner of both primary "ŋ" and secondary "w" -- that is, "γ". Hardening all the way to "g" is impossible in Uralic, since they don't have voiced stops, and hardening to "k" would remove the voicing of the original, and move it too far away from the original for sonority.
Plus, the word sounds pretty exotic to Uralic ears -- why not use that rare exotic back consonant, to give that extra exotic flare to this strange new animal species that is seemingly too wild to be tamed?
Note that I didn't have to conjecture that the two morphemes from P-Y could be assembled to mean "strong, firm" -- that assembly is already attested in one of the descendants. So, all the more likely that one of their older cousins did the same thing to coin the name for the newly domesticated horse -- "the strong and firm one -- the one that's almost too willful to be tamed".
That's also a trait of the horse's less famous relative, the donkey -- that it's very stubborn, and therefore "firm" or "set in its ways" is equally good for that equine as well. Can't forget our cute ass friends while touring horse-world. ^_^
I don't think the Yeniseian speakers began near Botai and migrated eastward -- the zone of maximum diverisity of the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family is in the Eastern Steppe, near the Sayan Mountains, since the Na-Dene speakers left the Old World through the furthest northeast corner of Asia into the New World.
ReplyDeleteRather, the Botai were one of the westernmost groups of Yeniseian speakers, who were the furthest west of the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family. But they are eastward migrants -- the Wa headed east and south into Japan, while the Na-Dene headed east and north into the New World. Yeniseians hung out more or less where they always were.
Uralic speakers mainly spread their languages in the other direction -- westward, from the Altai-Sayan region.
Why did Yeniseian lose this word for "horse", and replace it with "kus"? Hell if I know -- but it's probably a taboo replacement of some kind, since the horse was sacred to its first tamers. Or the original word acquired a negative connotation, if it began to be ridden by biker gangs rather than honest hard-working people, so a euphemism was needed.
ReplyDeleteIndo-European almost entirely lost its original word for horse, during the Dark Ages, as nomadic horse-riders from the Eastern Steppe suddenly gave horses a bad name.
Without going on the entire whirlwind tour all over again, the only I-E languages to keep the original word for "horse" are Iranian and to a lesser extent Armenian -- cuz in their part of the world, the conquering nomadic raiders of the Dark Ages rode on camels, not horses, so camels took on the negative connotation in their languages. Iranians still refer derogatorily to Arabians as camel milk-drinkers (and lizard-eaters).
But since Yeniseian speakers were the nomadic raiders, they probably did the opposite -- beginning with a bland generic name, and then coining a triumphalist epithet to celebrate it.
In P-Y, "kus" = "horse" looks like it has a similar base of "ku-" for 2 other wild animal names -- "kun" = "wolverine" and "kuɬep" = "ermine". Both of the latter two are wild, not domesticated. So "ku-" was a base for wild fauna. P-Y likes to form words this way, with a base of V or CV, and a single C tacked onto the end, which has no meaning in itself, but is simply there to distinguish members of the same CV base.
So when they were roaming wild, or perhaps to refer to the entire family of equids, they used "kus", which has no descriptive etymology -- just a generic base for wild animals "ku-", and a meaningless coda consonant "-s" to distinguish it from "kun" and "kuɬep" and whatever else they might coin from that base tomorrow.
When they began to tame and domesticate them, and take pride in their accomplishment, and to celebrate the animal's majesty itself, they coined an epithet with a clear descriptive meaning and transparent morphology -- "the strong, unmoveable one".
MAJOR breakthrough on Proto-Turkic -- it was a Samoyedic language that creolized with Yeniseian. I'll probably have to write this all up in a separate standalone new post, but it will take a bit to do that.
ReplyDeleteFor now, suffice it to say that Pre-Proto-Turkic was a literal Uralic language, from the Samoyedic branch, in the southern region near the Altai-Sayan Mountains. Due to the very ancient age of this language, it could have been the same as the ancestor of the now-extinct southern Samoyedic languages like Mator and Kamassian. So all we can say, without further fine-grained inspection, is that it was Southern Samoyedic.
During the birth of nomadic tribal confederations on the Eastern Steppe, during the 1st millennium BC, it became creolized with Yeniseian. But it remained mostly like the Samoyedic parent, with Yeniseian playing more of a shaping influence, not fundamentally altering it -- it still had agglutinative rather than polysynthetic morphology, still had vowel harmony vs. no vowel harmony, still had 2 liquid approximants, still had only 1 sibilant, still had no voiced obstruents or any kind of consonant contrast (like voicing or aspiration), and so on.
What Yeniseian did was to cause a total re-analysis of its morpheme boundaries. Compared to the typical Uralic word shape of CVCCV, the typical word shape of Yeniseian is CVC. Therefore, the former atomic words in Samoyedic that had a medial consonant sequence, were now re-analyzed as 2 separate morphemes, across that CC sequence -- CVC.CV. Now the CVC became the word root, and the final CV was a suffix or other atomic word to form a compound. This also allowed for suffixes of shape CVC, like Yeniseian but unlike Uralic. That in turn allowed for words of shape CVC.CVC, or VC.CVC, which came to typify Turkic.
Yeniseian also exerted massive influence phonotactically, so that initial nasals became banned (like Yeniseian, unlike Uralic), and initial liquids were banned (like Yeniseian, unlike Uralic -- except its ban on initial "r", which both sides agreed on).
For its phoneme inventory, there arose some voiced obstruents (like "d" and "g") to create a 2-way contrast with voicing, more like Yeniseian (whether that was due to voicing or aspiration, still it was a 2-way contrast), and unlike Uralic (where voiced obstruents are rare).
ReplyDeleteHowever, Proto-Turkic "b" did not arise from an earlier "p" -- rather, it reflected Samoyedic sound changes, where Proto-Samoyedic "p" was weakened into either "f", bilabial "f", or "x". Southern Samoyedic opted for "x". But Proto-Turkic doesn't like fricatives, since Uralic does not either. So it likely hardened "x" into "k", although I'll have to look more into that to confirm. That means some instance of Proto-Turkic "k" originated from Proto-Samoyedic / Uralic "p".
That's why "p" is banned initially in Proto-Turkic, whereas the other initial stop consonants must be voiceless, "t" or "k" or "č". Initial "p" in southern Samoyedic became initial "x", and when this carried over into Proto-Turkic, "x" hardened into "k", or was weakened further into "h" and deleted altogther, something like that -- but it was no longer a labial consonant.
The P-T initial labial stop must be "b", a very striking asymmetry. This does not come from earlier "p", as "d" and "g" arose from "t" and "k". Rather, this also reflects Samoyedic developments, where "w" hardened into either "m" or "b" -- yes, southern Samoyedic languages got a genuine voiced labial stop "b", from hardening P-S / P-U "w".
This also explains why "w" is absent from the P-T phoneme inventory, while "y" is preserved -- very odd to not have "w". Well, it was carrying over Samoyedic developments, which preserved "y" better than "w". Although "y" was subject to hardening in initial position, it survives as "y" even today in some languages like Tundra Nenets, and it survived in coda position in southern languages like Kamassian as well. Proto-Turkic could not have ZERO glides, so they kept the one that was better preserved in Samoyedic -- "y" -- while hardening "w" into "m" or "b".
That then triggered a further opacity event, since Yeniseian bans initial nasals, and Proto-Turkic reflected that. So, if initial "w" from P-U / P-S became "m" (rather than "b"), it would've been deleted entirely, whether or not some of its features colored the following vowel -- no more initial consonant, suddenly vowel-initial. P-U and P-S do allow for vowel-initial words, but they're less common. P-T has a shit-load of vowel-initial words, and this helps to explain why -- they used to begin with liquids or nasals in Samoyedic, and some of those may have even been glides earlier in Samoyedic or Uralic.
This explains the apparent asymmetry / contradiction for why P-T forces initial stops to be voiceless except for the labial position, where it must be "b" rather than "p". First, "p" vanished and became "x" or "h" or "k" or deleted, and it only re-entered the phoneme inventory at a later time. The obligatory initial "b" does not reflect a voiced stop -- it reflects an initial "w", and as a glide, that is allowed in P-T phonotactics, since initial "y" is allowed.
In other words, initial "b" was grandfathered in, since it was already there in southern Samoyedic. The ban against "d" and "g" appearing initially, is a much later law -- which only began when the new voiced obstruents "d" and "g" were introduced under Yeniseian influence, as they were not present in southern Samoyedic or Uralic.
Since "b" was not a newly introduced phoneme, it was not subject to this law. The law must be re-framed: "the new voiced stops cannot compete with the already existing stops, in initial position". This law only targeted "d" and "g", which were not already existing, but it ignored "b", since that was not newly introduced, but longstanding in southern Samoyedic, including in initial position.
Well, that's enough of the brief overview for now.
Now onto some more lexical correspondences, to show that Proto-Turkic not only looks like Samoyedic, but received a large chunk of its lexicon from Samoyedic / Proto-Uralic, via inheritance, not borrowing. There are zillions of examples, but here are a few more that are crucial to cultural identity in the Altai-Sayan region -- yep, more words about horse-mounted archery! ^_^
ReplyDeleteWell, I already showed that P-T "yunt" comes from P-S "juntå", not vice versa, since it obeys Samoyedic rather than Turkic phonotactics ("nt" is common in Uralic and Samoyedic, rare and potentially a loan in Turkic).
Now for the key archery terms, "bow" and "arrow".
We already saw two related words for "bow" in P-S, which also look like their word for "horse", perhaps all being vowel-alternated forms relating to the theme of horse-mounted archery.
There's P-S "jäntə" = "bow-string" and "jïntə" = "bow", and both are from Proto-Uralic.
Re-analysis of morpheme boundaries (under Yeniseian influence), caused P-T to view "jän" / "jïn" as the root, and "tə" as an identical suffix for both words, which it ignored.
In P-T, "bow" is "yā", where the final "n" of the Samoyedic word has been deleted and the preceding vowel lengthened to compensate. Language-wide, it merged "ä" and "a". Why did it choose the variant with "a" instead of "ï"? Cuz long "ï" seems to not exist or be very rare in P-T, whereas long "a" is totally fine, including following "y", where no words are followed by long "ï" but plenty are followed by long "a".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/y%C4%81
As for "arrow", there's P-S "muŋkə", which refers to a blunt-head arrow, the kind used to stun or kill by blunt force, like smaller animals used for their pelts, which hunters do not want to ruin with piercing arrow-heads. This is also of Proto-Uralic origin, where it can refer to other blunt weapon regions as well.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/mu%C5%8Bk%C9%99
In 2 of the 3 attested reflexes of this word, the final vowel has been deleted, and in 1 the nasal has been deleted as well. Seemingly both of these changes happened in Pre-Proto-Turkic, with something like "muk".
P-T bans initial nasals, so this would show up as "uk" -- just about identical to the actual P-T word for "arrow", which is "ok".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/ok
Why did it opt for "o" instead of "u"? Probably not from Samoyedic developments, since all the attested forms have "u", not "o". Semantically, to avoid homophony with unrelated "uk" = "to hear, understand".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/uk-
Phonetically, maybe the lost initial "m" systematically leads to "o" instead of "u" for some reason, IDK.
Why short vowel instead of long? This would stem from the earlier deletion of the nasal during Samoyedic, which would mean there's nothing to delete in P-T and no compensatory lengthening. However, the Oghur branch of Turkic, which is the oldest, *does* show a long vowel, reconstructed as "ōχ", so perhaps in Pre-PT, it was still "muŋk", and deletion of the nasal happened during P-T, triggering compensatory lengthening of the vowel.
One dialect of Chuvash has "u" instead of "o", BTW, so it's not so far away from the Samoyedic vowel.
In any case, the phonetic derivation is clear enough, and semantically they mean the same thing, just losing the specificity of "blunt-head" arrow, and now referring to "arrow" in general.
One final crucial and tantalizing example. The verb "to be" is never a loan-word in any language due to the high frequency of its usage -- "old habits die hard", but if it's not so habitual, it can be replaced.
ReplyDeleteIn P-T, "to be, become" is "ol".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/ol-
In P-U, it's "wole". The P-S descendant of this is far less similar to the P-T word, "åəj", with "l" -> "j" as per usual in P-S. But just suppose that some Samoyedic language preserved a more archaic form of this verb -- it would be irregularly preserving coda "l", since P-S regularly alters that to "j". But again, old habits die hard -- and the most irregular verb in any language is "to be". Irregularities are preserved through force of habit, and what's more frequently used than "to be"?
Suppose also that it preserved the initial "w", which would be expected -- the P-S reconstruction based on the attested forms, which lack "w", are the strange anomalies. So supposing initial "w" here is the expectation, not a radical departure.
Also suppose that like the reconstruction in P-S based on existing forms, the final vowel of P-U had deleted, and it ended in a coda consonant -- by supposition, "l" rather than "j".
It may have preserved the "o" from P-U, but even if it did not, "å" is just a slightly lower vowel from "o". P-T does not have a low, back, rounded vowel like that, so it would have raised it back up to "o".
And so, this Samoyedic form, "wol" or "wål", would be rendered in P-T as "ol", since P-T lacks "w" and would simply delete it. P-S preferred something different, hardening "w" into "m" or "b", but that rule may have ceased being active by P-T, when "w" no longer existed and was a distant memory at best, so they just deleted "w".
What's striking about this example is that, although P-T "ol" clearly derives from P-U "wole", it doesn't go through the reconstructed P-S form "åəj". And since P-U was a long-dead language by the time P-T arose, there's no way for P-T to go back in time to borrow from P-U. I reject the P-U-like form being preserved in a 3rd unattested source and then entering P-T -- an extra parameter that cannot be justified, just an ad hoc.
So, perhaps the reconstruction of P-S needs to be over-hauled as well -- by treating Pre-Proto-Turkic as a Samoyedic language, and inferring its nature from both attested Samoyedic languages, Uralic-wide patterns, and what is reconstructed in P-T.
Maybe the P-S word for "to be" was not actually "åəj" after all, but "wål", which is reflected in Pre-PT, but was further altered in the other Samoyedic languages to "åəj".
Both theories have a glaring irregularity -- "wål" has the regular retention of "w" but irregular preservation of coda "l", and "åəj" has irregular deletion of initial "w" but regular alteration of coda "l" to "j".
Since "to be" is so frequent, what would otherwise be irregularities can be preserved. The question is, which of the two irregularities is more likely to be preserved, based on internal evidence? That, I don't know, a specialist in Samoyedic would have to weigh in. But on universal grounds, deletion rather than alteration is a worse offense, so "wål" is better than "åəj" on those grounds. Also, "åəj" is worse by epenthesizing a segment that was not in the original, namely "ə", which is not a regular epenthesis when lowering P-U "o" to P-S "å".
And based on external evidence, the link to P-T clearly points to earlier "wål", not "åəj".
So, not only do we see how deep the roots of P-T go into the Samoyedic family -- since "to be" is never a loan or substrate word -- we've also managed to revise some of the troublesome irregularities out of the picture of reconstructed Proto-Samoyedic.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem with reconstructing P-S is that it has so few surviving descendants, none of them were ever very literate, they have come under heavy influence from neighboring families in the past 2000 years, and we're lucky that some random Russian explorer was just passing through the region circa 1800 to record a few dozen of their common words (not even a full lexicon).
By using Pre-PT to view all the way back into 500 BC or so, we get to strip away all the neighboring influences since then in the attested Samoyedic languages, none of which had writing until recently. And unlike the agreed-upon Samoyedic languages, Proto-Turkic and its Pre-PT stage are far more widely attested in their descendants, many of whom have been literate for 1500 years, not to mention leaving loan-words etc. in their literate neighbors like Chinese, Iranian, Russian, etc.
Proto-Samoyedic will look like much less of a black sheep in the Uralic family, once Pre-PT is used to add sorely missing details to what Samoyedic languages used to be like in the late 1st millennium BC. It'll still look different from the other Uralic branches, but it won't have so many irregularities particular to it, as it does now.
...Another day, another revolution series of insights from the cliff-dwelling sage in the ruins of the blogosphere... to me, it really just is another interesting day of wandering down the secret passageways of the universe! ^_^ If they happen to be big or small, I don't care, you discover whatever you discover. But it is nice when they're major rather than minor. ^_^
On the topic of nomad dominant vs sedentary dominant, are West Africa nomad dominant right now? They have a lot of fortifications right now and in the 19th century before European empires conquered the region:
ReplyDeletehttps://anl.geog.ufl.edu/fortified-landscapes/
Forget to mention that P-T does have a form of "to be" that begins with "b", as expected of initial "w" from P-S becoming "b" by the stage of P-T. It's "bol", and is far more common for the Turkic family, including the earliest branch Oghur.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/bol-
I focused on the "ol" variant to show how it could aid in reconsruction of Proto-Samoyedic, and since attention was already drawn to the similarity between P-T "ol" and P-U "wole".
Wiktionary's entry for P-T "ol" mentions this connection, as well as the connection to Mongolic and Tungusic, which must be other creoles involving Uralic / Samoyedic. I reject the connection to P-IE "h₂el" = "to grow, nourish" on semantic differences (not the basic verb for "to be"), and phonetically "h₂" is the "a"-coloring laryngeal, whereas "ol" has a round vowel (h3 is the "o"-coloring laryngeal).
However, Wiktionary's entry for P-T "bol" does NOT mention this connection -- if only they took the Samoyedic connection seriously! They would've seen Samoyedic harden "w" into "m" or "b", which in this case must have been "b".
That means P-T preserves two variants of a Samoyedic verb for "to be", both inherited from P-U "wole", but perhaps through different regional dialects within the Samoyedic branch. After all, the Steppe nomad confederations brought all sorts of cultures together -- not necessarily one narrow dialect of Samoyedic, perhaps several of them.
Or, the alternate forms reflect different stages of the Samoyedic-to-PT transition. The "w" -> "b" form shows an old rule, which was productive within Samoyedic proper. The deletion of "w" due to lack of the phoneme entirely, is a later rule, after all experience with "w" was lost, and the input "wål" was treated more like a loanword from a foreign language, which confirms a later date -- P-T has already begun to speciate away from its Samoyedic origin, that the Samoyedic word sounded more like a foreign language.
So the two P-T forms of "to be, become" are doublets, both of Uralic and specifically Samoyedic origin, but entering P-T during different stages of the evolution from purely Samoyedic to the Yeniseian-influenced creole that was still mostly Samoyedic, but distinct and properly termed Proto-Turkic.
The same different time of entering the language, applies to Mongolic and Tungusic forms of this Uralic / Samoyedic word.
ReplyDeleteLike Turkic, Mongolic has doublets, one showing the old rule "w" -> "b", and another that simply deleted the initial "w". Like P-T, P-M lacks "p" yet has "t" and "k" and "c", and it has "y" but lacks "w". This reflects the exact same Samoyedic phoneme inventory that is found in P-T. Also P-M only has 1 sibilant, like P-S and P-T.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%85#Mongolian
I'm not certain that Mongolic actually has 2 variant forms, since "ol" means "to find, obtain", which is a bit far away from "to be, become". I keep it here just in case.
So, the process of incorporating the Uralic / Samoyedic verb "to be, become" was identical for P-M as it was for P-T -- harden "w" to "b", or delete "w". At the earlier stage, "b", and the later stage, "o".
I know that P-M is somewhat younger than P-T, going back only to 1000 AD or so, but Para-Mongolic is an older family, about the same age as P-T, and I'm sure these Mongolic verbs go back to that stage as well -- ultimately, from Samoyedic, under Yeniseian influence.
Proto-Tungusic also lacks "w" (despite what Wikipedia claims; Wiktionary shows only 1 word with "w" at all, possibly a loan then). There's a claim that P-Tung "ō" = "to make, become" at the Wiktionary entry for P-Turk "ol", but it's not listed on the P-Tung pages. If it's real, it is a late entry into P-Tung, after "w" was already lost and words with it were treated like foreign loans, with "w" simply deleted.
ReplyDeleteThere's a secure reconstruction "baldi" = "to be born; to live", which would have been an early entry into the language from Uralic, if that's where it's ultimately from.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Tungusic/baldi-
This has "a" instead of "o", but that may reflect a different strategy in Tungusic for dealing with P-S "å", which is low, back, rounded. P-Tung doesn't have that vowel, so it could raise it to "o" and preserve rounding, or shift it forward to central "a" and lose rounding. The lift to "o" is better, but maybe the shift to "a" was favored for some other reason, or it's irregular.
Also, this requires a suffix "-di", which does appear in several verbs, could be a meaningless verb suffix. Why add a meaningless suffix here, whereas P-Turk and P-M don't? P-Tung seems far less happy with monosyllabic roots, so they'd rather fill it out with a suffix.
This points to Tungusic being less similar to the pair of Turkic and Mongolic, which are like sisters or half-sisters, and Tungusic is a cousin or something. Possibly less Uralic influence on Tungusic -- but instead, a Uralic-like family such as Yukaghir or Chukotko-Kamchatkan, which also have vowel harmony, are agglutinative, have similar phoneme inventories, etc.
Unlike Turkic and Mongolic, Tungusic does not ban initial "l", nor any of its 4 nasals in initial position. So that points to weak Yeniseian influence, and looking more Uralic, or Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, etc. And those are more widely spoken in the places where Tungusic spread -- Manchuria, Amur River, and the far NE of Asia, not near the Altai-Sayan region.
And so, whereas Japonic looks like Turkic and Mongolic, I expect Korean to look more like Tungusic, in their ethnic / cultural origins.
The preference for multisyllabic roots in P-Tung is another sign of weak Yeniseian influence.
ReplyDeleteOn further inspection, I don't think P-Tung "baldi" is from Uralic or Samoyedic. It has the wrong vowel, as already mentioned, and the closest semantic and phonetic match is found in Yukaghir, not Uralic.
ReplyDeleteP-Tung "baldi" means "to be born", and Southern Yukaghir "polod'u" = "to be born" for animals. Again, the discrepancy for the vowel, but it has a "d"-like suffix, and it begins with "p" since Yukaghir doesn't have "b" -- it didn't go through the whole "w" -> "b" shift that Samoyedic did, and in fact it has "w".
So if a Uralic / Samoyedic word beginning with "w" entered Yukaghir, it would've kept "w", not delete it, nor alter it.
This makes Tungusic more a descendant of Yukaghir -- although possibly Uralic as well, IDK. Or, as a young language that only goes back to circa 1000 AD, and without an earlier Para-Tungusic family as there is with Para-Mongolic, maybe its similarities to Turkic and Mongolic *are* related to borrowing and contact with them, not shared origin or even sharing 1 parent of a creole.
In that case, Tungusic's similarity to Uralic is due to contact with Turkic and Mongolic, which are Samoyedic-origin creoles (with Yeniseian influence), and due to Tungusic perhaps being a creole involving Yukaghir, and Yukaghir resembles Uralic in many ways, so it's indirect rather than direct descent from Uralic.
I'm happy to offend all sides in the great Altaic debate. ^_^ Whatever the truth is, I will discover it. I just have to wander down enough secret passage-ways before I die...
About vowel harmony in Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic, and others of Northeast Asia. First, vowel harmony is absolutely NOT a vague "areal feature", or due to "contact" or "borrowing". The simple proof is the vast family of Dene-Yeniseian, none of whose languages have ever had any kind of vowel harmony -- despite occupying the same land as the vowel harmonic speakers, being neighbors with the vowel harmonic speakers, and people switching from one language family to the other.
ReplyDeleteAs for "borrowing", you can't borrow an abstraction or a system or a paradigm. You can only borrow something conrete and specific and narrow, like an individual word -- not a morpheme, since that includes bound morphemes like suffixes, prefixes, etc., which are not borrowed. You can borrow many, many individual words, but you can't borrow a suffix, or an entire group of phonemes (like emphatic consonants from Semitic), or a productive abstract set of rules like "front-back vowel harmony".
What you borrow, must make sense to you as a borrower. A pairing of sound and meaning for a specific referent -- a "word" -- makes sense to you, as a borrower. You can specify what is being borrowed -- "this group of sounds, refers to this meaning".
No one can say, "this group of consonants has voicing", or "vowels must agree with each other regarding their frontness". Only a linguist or language teacher can do that, not an ordinary speaker. So, unlike words, phonemes are meaningless to a speaker, and so are rules, paradigms, processes, etc. Words can be borrowed, not the other things.
Highly distinctive, fully productive systems, rules, or paradigms, are either inherited from parent languages, including the possibility of a creole inheriting from one of its parents -- or they are carried over during language shift, by force of habit.
Now getting specific, Proto-Turkic vowel harmony is the exact same as in Proto-Uralic, which was inherited into its branches, including Samoyedic. Namely, vowels are divided into 2 groups -- front and back -- and vowel harmony says that vowels must occur with those from the same group, not mixing the groups. This rule applies at the atomic word level, as well as during the addition of suffixes.
ReplyDeleteNo other language family in the vicinity of the Proto-Turkic homeland had this kind of vowel harmony. In fact, families to the west had no system of vowel harmony whatsoever. Those to the southeast, like Chinese, had no vowel harmony either. Those to the east and north had vowel harmony, but the two groups of vowels were high vs. low, not front vs. back. We'll get to that in a moment.
So, P-T can only have received its front-back vowel harmony from a Uralic language, including Samoyedic. This makes it look like an out-growth of Samoyedic -- and in this case, without Yeniseian influence, since all Dene-Yeniseian languages lack vowel harmony.
But Turkic vowel harmony is even more like Samoyedic than that. Although probably not in Proto-Turkic, during some of the descendant branches like Oghuz, a 2nd kind of vowel harmony will develop, based on roundedness of vowels. And far from one kind of vowel harmony replacing the other, the front harmony was preserved along with the new round harmony, which is exemplified by Turkish.
None of the other Northeast Asian language families with vowel harmony, have a round harmony, so they cannot explain this (later) development in Turkic. Only Uralic can, and Samoyedic is the best explanation among the various Uralic branches.
In Proto-Uralic, the vowel inventory allowed for the 2 independent kinds of vowel harmony shown in Turkish. At the high height, P-U has both front and back vowels, each of which come in rounded and unrounded forms -- front-unround "i", front-round "ü", back-unround "ï", and back-round "u". P-U only used 1 kind of harmony, based on front vs. back. But a round harmony was *possible*, given its vowel inventory.
However, in the descendants of Uralic, only 1 branch kept these 4 vowels in its inventory -- Proto-Samoyedic. In fact, P-S added several more vowels that allowed for both a front harmony and a round harmony. Along with the 4 vowels at the high height from P-U, it expanded the set of vowels at the mid height, which in P-U were only "e" and "o", but P-S added "ö" in front and "ë" in back. At the low height, P-U only had "ä" and "a", but P-S added "å" in back, though not a front-round vowel to fully complete the set.
The other branches do not allow for both kinds of vowel harmony. In the Ugric branch, only Eastern Khanty has the set of 4 at the high height. The rest of the Ugric branch does not (Northern Khanty, Mansi, Hungarian). Nor does Proto-Permic, Proto-Mordvinic, Proto-Sami, or Proto-Finnic. Mari does not have the 4 vowels at high height, but it does have a 4-vowel set at mid height -- still, not the one used in Turkic languages for round harmony.
So, the 2 independent kinds of vowel harmony -- front, and round -- that developed in the Oghuz Turkic branch, must ultimately trace back to Proto-Samoyedic. In fact, P-S and P-T have basically the same vowel inventories, and they're highly unusual / distinctive, not a common type. The only big difference is P-T has contrasting length for vowels, which as I've hinted at earlier, is due to compensatory lengthening during their re-analysis of morpheme boundaries, phoneme inventory, and phonotactics, once Samoyedic came under Yeniseian creolization influence.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Samoyedic_language#Phonology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Turkic_language#Vowels
In the attested descendants of P-S, like Mator, the back vowels split into a central vs. back dimension, where the round ones remained back, while the unround ones shifted toward the center. But that still allows a front vs. non-front harmony, as well as a round vs. unround harmony.
If Pre-PT was like Mator, then P-T simply shifted those central-unround vowels to their original back position. Or, Pre-PT did not show this split among the back vowels of P-S, and there was no problem to solve for P-T.
Aside from Uralic, the only other family in NE Asia with a front-back harmony is Yukaghir, although whether that's a separate family from Uralic or not, is up for debate. See the Uralo-Siberian theory, which is strongest for Uralic and Yukaghir.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fortescue#Uralo-Siberian_languages
However, geographically Yukaghir is spoken too far to the north and east to explain Proto-Turkic, whereas the Proto-Samoyedic homeland overlaps the Proto-Turkic homeland (Altai-Sayan).
And phonologically, neither Yukaghir language has a set of 4 vowels at a single height, contrasting front vs. back and round vs. unround. At the high height, they only have 2 vowels, "i" and "u" (each in long vs. short versions). So there's no way that Yukaghir explains the vowel inventory of P-T, nor the later development of 2 independent kinds of vowel harmony (based on front, and round), let alone at the high height. Only P-S can do this.
Proto-Eskaleut also has a front vs. non-front harmony, but no round harmony of any kind. Like Yukaghir, it does not have a set of 4 vowels at any height that contrast front-ness and roundness. Rather, only length is contrasted at a given place. Geographically, it's even further toward the Arctic and New World direction.
For families somewhat closer to the present Altaic language belt, vowel harmony is based on high vs. low -- Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Nivkh.
Ainu did not have vowel harmony, although since it's Uralic, it must have had at an earlier stage. Proto-Ainu reconstructions only go back to around 1000 AD or later. Vowel harmony loss is attested in the Permic branch of Uralic, and a major member of the Karluk branch of Turkic -- Uzbek. So Ainu must have lost its vowel harmony as well.
The point being, only Proto-Samoyedic provides the vowel inventory for Proto-Turkic, the front vowel harmony, and the possibility of a round harmony in addition to the front harmony (although P-S did not employ such a round harmony, later Turkic branches did).
Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic, and Korean all show a somewhat different kind of vowel harmony from Turkic. It's more of a creole system, mixing a front-back harmony with a low-high harmony. The result is a system that divides vowels into 2 groups, which we can simply think of as high-front vs. low-back. The jargon here is "advanced tongue root" vs. "retracted tongue root", but that's not very helpful.
ReplyDeleteSo, instead of a vertical dividing line (for front-back), or a horizontal line (for low-high), there's a diagonal dividing line running from the lower-left to the upper-right (high-front vs. low-back).
This system is still productive in Mongolic and Tungusic. It was productive in Middle Korean, but is fading in Modern Korean.
It was productive in Proto-Japonic but not later. This is Arisaka's Law, which says the central vowel "ə" did not (usually) co-occur with "u", "o", or "a". This suggests that "ə" was grouped with the high-front vowels "i" and "e", vs. the low-back vowels of "u", "o", and "a".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Japonic_language#Vowels
However, this did not involve restrictions on the other high-front vowels "i" and "e" from co-occuring with "u", "o", or "a". In fact, it's very common to see "i" occur with "a", "u", and "o" within atomic roots. And Arisaka's Law did not apply beyond the domain of atomic root, unlike the highly productive ones in Uralic and Turkic.
So, Japonic has rarely had vowel harmony -- a testament to its descent from the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family, which also lacks vowel harmony of any kind, despite being a family of Northeast Asia and surrounded by / interacting with vowel harmonic speakers for millennia.
Loss of vowel harmony is usually blamed on contact with non-harmonic languages, like Iranian languages (non-harmonic) depriving Uzbek of the usual Turkic vowel harmony. In the case of Ainu, which must have had harmony at some point due to being Uralic, the likely cause of its loss is heavy contact with Japonic (non-harmonic).
I interpret Mongolic, Tungusic, and Korean vowel harmony as a blend or creole, which requires one of the parents to be Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Nivkh (or both), for the low-high harmony. That is highly likely for Tungusic, and also likely for Korean, whose speakers seem to have come from the Buyeo culture in Manchuria.
ReplyDeleteMongolic must also have drawn from Nivkh speakers in the Amur region, who could have arrived in Mongolia during the Ulaanzuukh culture of the late 2nd millennium BC, or its westward expansion during the Slab-Grave culture of the mid-1st millennium BC. This suggests that Nivkh / Amuric was spoken further inland, like Manchuria, in those times, not confined to the Pacific coast like today.
Where does the front-back harmony come from in these blended systems? Well, Mongolic probably got it from Uralic, specifically Samoyedic -- it's right next-door. Tungusic and Korean are farther away from Samoyedic, so perhaps from the others of the north -- Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, or Eskaleut (doubtful). Still, since they were near the Steppe confederations and empires, they could have blended with some Samoyedic speakers as well.
Aside from the somewhat different vowel harmony systems in these Eastern families, compared to Samoyedic and Turkic, they also have sparser vowel inventories compared to Samoyedic and Turkic. And again, they don't contrast roundedness at the same place. Mongolic is somewhat more Uralic-influenced, in that it has front-round vowels at high and mid height -- however, they don't contrast with unround versions in the same place.
So the big picture remains the same -- Mongolic looks like a creole of Samoyedic and Yeniseian, but more on the Yeniseian side compared to Turkic, which is far more Samoyedic. Tungusic and Korean may have had Uralic influence, but may have gotten these features from other extreme NE Asian families that may be distantly related to Uralic, such as Yukaghir. However, now we see a key role for Nivkh / Amuric in Mongolic, Tungusic, and Korean.
Japonic is nearly purely like Dene-Yeniseian in these features.
Altaic pronouns come from Samoyedic! Just like the verb "to be", pronouns are never borrowed, only inherited -- and unlike meaningless phonemes, which may carry over by force of habit during language shift, pronouns are meaningful standalone words, so they don't carry over by force of habit.
ReplyDeleteNone of this is known, BTW, although the likeness of the Altaic pronouns to each other is known. And the likeness of Uralic and Yukaghir pronouns is known. But not the likeness of Uralic / Samoyedic and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic.
Right down to the bound morpheme suffixes for plural as well! Wow! This seals the deal -- the Altaic languages all have 1 parent in their creole process that is Samoyedic, although perhaps to varying degrees across the 3 of them. And crucially, the southern Samoyedic language Kamassian and its Koibal dialect, which are necessary to explain the very bizarre range of variation in Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic.
Are you ready?
Let's start with the very distinctive system of Proto-Uralic pronouns, and later we'll refine it by looking at Proto-Samoyedic and even specific languages of Samoyedic. For now, we're going to cover the basics with P-U -- which also shows how deep these pronouns go, they're not coinages of P-S.
ReplyDelete____ sing, plur
1st: minä, me
2nd: tinä, te
It's such a regular, rule-governed pattern, impossible to miss. There is a shared base for the 1st person ones, and a separate base for the 2nd person ones, with no clear relation between these bases. The plural is formed by removing the "nä" from the singular, and lowering the vowel from "i" -> "e". Equivalently, the singular is formed by taking the plural and adding the suffix "nä", and raising the root vowel from "e" -> "i".
What is strange here, is that the plural form has less material, while the singular has more -- the extra "nä". Most languages do the opposite, where the singular has less material, and the plural has an affix added onto the singular, if there's a clear derivation of one from the other (sometimes there's no derivation).
We'll start with Proto-Turkic pronouns, although Mongolic and Tungusic are mostly the same. The underlines are just to make the spacing of the chart nice.
____ sing, plur
1st: __bẹ, biŕ
2nd: __sẹ, siŕ
See the similarities? The singular and plural are derived from each other somehow, with a base and a suffix. The root vowels are "i" and "ẹ" (which is phonetically identical to P-U "e", a mid rather than low vowel, just written with a dot underneath in Turkic studies). The base is of shape CV, the suffix is C, which is in the alveolar / palatal region and is a resonant -- just like in P-Samoyedic, where the final vowel of P-U has already been deleted, leaving just "n" (alveolar resonant). The 1st person begins with a labial consonant, the 2nd person begins with a voiceless alveolar consonant.
Very clearly derived from Uralic / Samoyedic, but now time for the full derivation...
First, the Yeniseian influence. Like most languages, Yeniseian uses the singular pronoun as the base, and adds extra material onto it to form the plural. For the 1st person, the singular is "ad" or "aj", and this base takes the plural / collective noun suffix "Vŋ" to form the plural pronoun "ʌdʌŋ" or "ajʌŋ".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/ax%CA%B7
Because the Uralic system was so unusual (marked), Yeniseian's influence was to make the derivation the usual (unmarked) direction -- the singular will be the base, and the suffix will go onto the plural. That's the only notable difference between the Samoyedic and Turkic pronoun system.
The base kept the same vowel, "e" / "ẹ", only in Turkic this base is used for the singular, not plural. The form with the suffix also kept the same vowel, "i", only now it's used for the plural, not singular.
Those are the paradigm shifts, now onto narrow phonetic changes.
As always, the Yeniseian influence, where nasals are banned initially, meant that the Samoyedic pronouns could not begin with "m" anymore. In the example of "arrow", we saw the "m" simply delete. But that cannot happen here, cuz the base is of shape CV, and eliminating the consonant altogether would result in a word of shape V, which is illegal in Yeniseian and Uralic phonotactics, and so illegal in Turkic as well.
The only choice is to harden "m" into "b", a la Samoyedic developments. It can't be softened into "w", since that no longer exists in Samoyedic, and thus not in P-T either.
Why did the 2nd person base go from "t" to "s"? This reflects an innovation of the Kamassian descendant of P-S, where the morphologically simple form was "šiʔ", and in the Koibal dialect it was "se". Boom -- mystery solved! This was a Sayan region language, now extinct, but apparently very influential during the 1st millennium BC, when the Altai-Sayan region was *the* place to be!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/te
Now all that's left is to explain that very unusual plural suffix "ŕ"...
The P-T plural suffix "ŕ" is not only used in pronouns, it appears elsewhere, but in early P-T there was no single plural suffix, so to speak. There was a variety, and over the course of Turkic history, these were narrowed down and regularized into a few.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/-%C5%95
This very unusual consonant goes different ways in the branches of Turkic -- in the oldest one, Oghur, it becomes "r", while in the other branches, collectively called Common Turkic, it becomes "z". It's bizarre for "r" and "z" to derive from the same consonant, but that's what we can tell.
The single phoneme status of "ŕ" is not totally agreed upon for P-T. I agree somewhat, but I think it's due to dialect variation in the Pre-PT or P-T stage, namely what the region that spawned Oghur was hearing, vs. what everyone else was hearing, in their local mix of Samoyedic dialects, which do differ among each other (like the Kamassian 2nd person pronoun base starting with a sibilant rather than "t").
Regardless of whether we model this variation as present in the P-T stage, or as a single phoneme that is highly bizarre cuz it's fusing together the variation at that stage, I don't care. Let's figure out what sounds were in the local mix of dialects, which eventually led to "r" in Oghur and "z" in Common Turkic.
Well, the Samoyedic pronoun suffix "n" was not preserved, since in that language, it was a singulative suffix -- showing up on the singular, not plural. It does seem to have been preserved in the so-called "pronomial n", which shows up in the inflections of the pronouns, and in Common Turkic it was re-applied to the singular, yielding "ben", which makes it even more like the original Samoyedic 1st person singular. Also worth noting that in many descendants of Common Turkic, the "b" softened into "m", once the Yeniseian influence of banning initial nasals had weakened, yielding "men" and becoming even closer to the Samoyedic original.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/ben
In any case, the new P-T suffix had to be plural, not singulative. And it continued using Samoyedic as its source. In P-U, as well as in P-S, the plural suffix is "t" at the end of a word, and "y" in the middle of a word.
However, in the good ol' Kamassian language, the plural begins with "z" -- "zaŋ". Probably the Yeniseian speakers heard the "aŋ" of that suffix and said, "that's too much like our own plural suffix 'Vŋ', so we'll ignore that when trying to learn their words, but keep their 'z'".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamas_language#Grammar
Common Turkic reflects only this Kamassian innovation, "z". Perhaps in the region where Common Turkic was spawned, Kamassian was overwhelmingly the Samoyedic language that the locals heard. Perhaps that means the Common Turkic speakers were themselves former Kamassian speakers.
In the region that spawned Oghur, they apparently heard Kamassian somewhat, but not overwhelmingly. They also heard Samoyedic languages where the plural was the typical Uralic / Samoyedic "t / y" pair. They tried to compromise or resolve a very strange brew of consonants -- "t", "y", and "z". Both "y" and "z" are voiced, so throwing "t" in would probably make it assimilate for voicing anyway -- make the result voiced. The "t" only provides some stop-like manner. What else is in the alveolar place, is voiced, and is kind of continuant but also kind of stop-like? And with central rather than lateral air-flow? A tap / flap "r". There may be other phonemes to realize this mix as, but it's a natural choice to make -- and it's the one the Oghur branch did make.
If we insist on reconstructing a single P-T phoneme that both Oghur and Common Turkic derive from, that's just one extra step. The same reasoning as in the Oghur case to arrive at "r", but they wanted to preserve the distinctiveness of "y" (as opposed to "t" or "z"), by giving the result secondary palatalization. So, instead of alveolar "r", palatalized "ŕ".
ReplyDeleteFrom this case study, I favor *not* reconstructing "ŕ", since that adds an entire phoneme to the inventory of P-T, as though that were a single language with that single phoneme, which split into 2 different phonemes only later on in the descendants.
But having drilled deep down into the tunnel of secrets buried inside of the Sayan Mountains, I have discovered that the "divergence" among the Oghur vs. Common Turkic forms may not be a divergence from a single ancestral source. Rather, there was regional variation all the way back in the beginning, based on where Kamassian was more dominant vs. not-so-dominant. In the former region, "z" was chosen for the plural suffix, in the latter it was "r".
Maybe further investigation will change my mind on this, and I haven't looked into the "l" vs. "sh" split yet either. So we'll see, but for now, I favor keeping the P-T phoneme inventory simple, and explaining the "r" vs. "z" "divergence" as stemming from regional variation in the ancestral era.
But the big picture, again, is that this was regional variation in *Samoyedic*, not some vague hazy "Pre-Proto-Turkic" reconstruction. It was literally Kamassian vs. other languages of the Samoyedic branch, within the Uralic family.
As for specifically where the Oghur homeland was, all we can say is that it was further north than the nexus of the Altai-Sayan mountain pass. The only surviving member is Chuvash, and it was represented by Bulgar -- the old Turkic language of the Bulgars, before they adopted the Slavic language of the people they united just north of the Black Sea, before heading south into Thrace, where they spawned the Bulgarian Empire in reaction to their newfound meta-ethnic nemesis, the Byzantine Empire.
ReplyDeleteHere's map of the Turkic family:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TurkicLanguageMap.svg
The only notable thing about Oghur is that it was spoken only in the north, along the Steppe or further north, whereas the Common Turkic branches include descendants south of the Steppe (and sometimes on the Steppe or north as well).
We can't infer anything about east vs. west, since just about all branches headed west, following the global east-to-west headwinds. It must have been near the Altai-Sayan region, though, since that's the homeland for the Turkic family, and where its Samoyedic parent was located, and near its Yeniseian parent as well.
IDK if there's a well known archaeological culture, or ethnic group, who fit this description. But the point is, they were on the northern fringe of the Turkic homeland, where non-Southern versions of Samoyedic were spoken, in addition to Southern ones.
I'll get to the Mongolic and Tungusic cases later, they're basically the same as Turkic. But I have to eat dinner, watch 90210, take a shower, run an errand, cuddle with my tiger-bear... so I need a nice break for now. ^_^
ReplyDeleteEureka! "Turk" means "fighter" in Uralic! Was there any doubt what their endonym meant? ^_^ I'm issuing this urgent discovery, and setting aside the pronoun discussion for later today. It's their original ethnic name, it's too important to wait!
ReplyDeleteOK, in P-T their endonym is "Tür(ü)k", and based on the oldest forms, it must have had a vowel between "r" and "k", which may have weakened and deleted later. There's variation in the height of the vowels, mid or high.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/T%C3%BCr(%C3%BC)k
In Hungarian, supposedly received via an Oghur intermediary, it's "török". In the language of the Rouran Khaganate, it's rendered using Chinese characters as "tyu.ryū-g". In Old Turkic, it's "tyryk". In Chuvash, it's "tĕrĕk" -- supposedly a learned later borrowing, but still with a vowel between "r" and "k", and like the Hungarian borrowing, both vowels are mid rather than high height.
I favor a mid height for the vowels, rather than high, due to the Hungarian and Chuvash forms, whether they're borrowed or not. At some point after the original coining of their name as "Török", reflected in Oghur loans into Hungarian and maybe Chuvash as well, the vowels were raised to "Türük", for reasons I don't understand at the moment. But certainly the high vowels look later than the mid vowels.
So where does this name come from, and what does it mean? Why, it's Samoyedic, of further Proto-Uralic origin! So it's not some borrowing into Samoyedic from a non-Uralic donor, it's Uralic all the way.
P-S has a verb "tårɜ" = "to fight; to wrestle, struggle", inherited from P-U "tora". In the only attested Southern language, Mator, it's "toro".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/t%C3%A5r%C9%9C-
The final "k" is a widespread Uralic nominalizing suffix that attaches to verbs. Way back in Proto-Uralic, it probably formed action nouns -- the act of doing the verb -- or a result noun that comes after the act of doing the verb. But it was utilized in many various ways in the descendant branches. The quickest reference I found is Janhunen (1982): "On the Structure of Proto-Uralic", but this is still a widely agreed-upon P-U bound morpheme, a deverbal nominalizing suffix "-k".
In this case, it must have been an agent / do-er suffix -- the noun who does the verb. Attaching to the verb for "to fight", it yields the noun "fighter".
That is the best semantic reading of the Turkic endonym -- they were famously, or infamously in the eyes of their subjects, FIGHTERS.
Phonetically, all that remains is shifting the vowels from back to front, "o" -> "ö". Perhaps that's for phonological reasons, like being pulled forward by the "t" and "r", which are alveolar / palatal. Or maybe it was a semi-productive kind of ablaut, to pluralize or collectivize a singular noun, i.e. from "fighter" to "fighters". Or ablaut to coin an ethnonym, rather than an ordinary noun.
This surpasses the theories listed at the Wiktionary entry, both semantically and phonetically. It does connect with the Old Uyghur word "türk" = "strength, yield; valiance". That is another noun derived from the verb like Mator "toro" = "to fight, wrestle, struggle", and ends in "k". But this is not of P-T origin, rather Samoyedic and further Uralic origin.
Turkic suffixes "-k" and "-ka" are Uralic as well. The Uralic deverbal nominalizing suffix "-k" was inherited into P-T, from the Samoyedic parent of its creolization, to form intransitive-passive nouns, based on the verb it attaches to:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/-k
Since this is passive, rather than active, it shows that the Turkic endonym was not assembled in P-T itself, in which case "-k" would make it mean something like "the ones who are fought" instead of "the ones who fight". Nobody, especially not expanding triumphalist empires, describe themselves in such passive terms, but as agents of their fate.
Also, there's no P-T verb beginning with "toro" or "turu" (or front-vowel equivalents), for the "-k" to attach to. There's only "törü" = "to be created, to come into existence", which is already semantically intransitive / passive anyway, and would not require "-k".
However, that verb may be the reason for raising and fronting the vowels of "torok", the Uralic word meaning "fighter". Since "the ones who are created" is a plausible ethnonym, it contaminated "torok" into fronting its vowels, since both vowels are front in "törü".
Also, one of the vowels is high in "törü". Since "torok" has both vowels at the same height, it would prefer to keep them both at the same height under any alteration. So if "törü" influenced "torok" by making the 2nd vowel "u", the ethnonym would still want both at the same height and make the 1st vowel "u" as well. That, plus the fronting influence of the vowels in "törü", could lead from "torok" -> "türük".
P-T also has a dative case suffix, expressing "to" the noun. It is reconstructed as "ka", but it's "na" in Oghur, suggesting original "ŋa", which split its features into "ka" and "na" in the descendants.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/-ka
Well well well, Proto-Finnic has a lative suffix, expressing "toward" the noun, which is highly similar in meaning to the dative. It's "-k" in P-F, but Wiktionary notes other forms suggesting "-ŋ" from its P-Uralic ancestor. Not only is the phonetic nature the same in the ancestor (P-U "ŋ" and P-T "ŋa"), but also the split into "k" and "n" in the descendants. The meaning is highly similar as well, so the P-T suffix was inherited ultimately from P-U, through its Samoyedic parent.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/-k
Bound morphemes like suffixes are never borrowed or adopted from substrates, only inherited. So, Proto-Turkic shows inheritance from the Uralic family, although that's just 1 parent in a creole -- in Turkic, by far the more influential parent of the creole, but still just 1 parent, who cannot be the sole influence in the creation of P-T, since that requires the Yeniseian influence as well.
"Mongol" name means "arrow" in Uralic, same use as name of Turkic military divisions, and then clans based on such military units, which is from same Uralic root. After solving the mystery of the origin of "Turk", why not solve "Mongol" as well?! ^_^
ReplyDeleteFirst, the endonym of the Mongols did not originally have any consonant after the 2nd vowel, and both vowels were high "u" rather than mid "o". The first tribal name resembling "Mongol" is recorded by the Chinese in the 8th C AD as "Muwngu" (using Middle Chinese pronunciation), in a list of northern Steppe tribes. During the Liao era circa 1000 AD, a similar tribe is recorded as "MuwngkuX" (final "X" is a rising-tone marker, not a phoneme).
This is not just any ol' tribe from the north, but a branch of the Shiwei -- whom Genghiz Khan went on to unify, and usher in the Mongol Empire. So it's both a phonetic and semantic match.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia#Etymology
This name means "arrow" in Southern Samoyedic, as reflected in Mator "muŋgu" -- a dead-ringer for the Mongol tribe name. It comes from P-S, and back to Proto-Uralic. So it's as Uralic as can be, but deriving from the Southern Samoyedic speakers who we have seen play such a central role in both Turkic and now Mongolic ethnogenesis. Maybe Tungusic, too, who knows?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/mu%C5%8Bk%C9%99
We saw this word earlier, where it became "ok" or "uk" in Proto-Turkic. The phonological difference in Mongolic is that it allows initial nasals, unlike Turkic. Only Yeniseian bans initial nasals, in the region, so that influence must have been strongest in Turkic, since the Yenisei River is to the west of Lake Baikal.
Further to the east of Lake Baikal, where Mongolic was spawned, there was less intense Yeniseian influence, shown by the allowance of initial nasals in Mongolic (and Tungusic). However, initial liquids are still banned in Mongolic and Tungusic, as in Turkic -- but *not* as in Uralic / Samoyedic, which allows "l" though not "r" initially.
That could be Wa-Dene-Yeniseian influence, since they ban initial liquids, whether "r" or "l" (which they don't have anyway). However, Wa / Japonic and Na-Dene do not ban initial nasals -- that is an innovation of Yeniseian specifically. So where Mongolic was spawned, it may have been under Wa / Japonic or Na-Dene influence, but not so much Yeniseian specifically.
Back to the derivation -- with less Yeniseian influence, Mongolic allows initial nasals, unlike Turkic, which deleted the "m" from Samoyedic "muŋgu", and who probably heard some other dialects where the final "u" had already been deleted, as in Enets and Nenets. Further away in Eastern Mongolia, they couldn't sample all these various Samoyedic languages that flourished to the west and north of Lake Baikal -- only the Southern ones who were the gate-keepers of the Sayan Mountain pass, which led straight to Eastern Mongolia.
ReplyDeleteSo in Eastern Mongolia, they heard "muŋgu" without any other Samoyedic variants. This became their early word for "arrow", certainly before Proto-Mongolic (which only goes back to circa 1000 AD), and during the Para-Mongolic era.
What's the link between the word for "arrow" and a tribal name? The Steppe confederations of this era used an arrow to symbolize a military division, similar to a flag or banner. Each division leader was given a ceremonial arrow by his superior, to legitimate his authority. As these military divisions came to unify entire tribes, rather than just act as mercenaries or opportunistic raiders, the word for "military division" was used for the entire clan or clans who they unified, still deriving from the word for "arrow".
As Turkic expansions took off in all directions, they still used a form of "ok" or "uk" to mean "clan, ethnos, military division". Perhaps they added a plural marker, to show that they had more than one clan united into a confederation -- this is where the tribal / language-branch names Oghur and Oghuz come from. Perhaps they added a numeral modifier for how many such clans they had united (like "on" = "10" for "Onogur", i.e. "10 tribes"). But all include the original word for "arrow", which was of Samoyedic origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_tribal_confederations
The exact same semantic extension happened in Para-Mongolic society, where the original word for "arrow" came to refer to a "clan" or "tribal confederation" if it had a plural marker. I'm not sure if they used it to refer to a military division, which they used "orda" for instead. But still, the semantic development was the same as in Turkic.
And as it turns out, so was the ultimate phonetic origin -- in the Samoyedic word for "arrow", which was inherited into both Turkic and Mongolic, during their creolization processes. They had slightly different phonotactics, due to proximity or distance from Yeniseian, so Turkic deleted the initial nasal, while Mongolic kept it. But that's just a Turkic vs. Mongolic shibboleth, despite both sharing the parent of Samoyedic.
I speculate that the later addition of final "l" to yield "Mongol" may be cognate with the highly problematic final consonant of Proto-Turkic "okuŕ", which became "ogur" and "oguz". Mongolic, like Oghur, chose to resolve this into a liquid, they just chose "l" instead of "r". Perhaps they heard the "ŕ" and said, "OK, it sounds like 'r', but not exactly" and chose the "not-r" liquid, i.e. "l".
ReplyDeleteThere must have also been a process of vowel-lowering from both "u" to both "o", which I don't know the history of, but anybody's theory has to assume that, since they must all begin with "Muwngu" and end up at "Mongol".
Unlike the major theory summarized at Wikipedia, mine is phonetically superior cuz it has a nasal, which theirs does not. They derive it from the personal name of a leader, "Mugulü", from the 4th C Rouran Khaganate. But all variants of the tribal name "Mongol" in various languages have a nasal. In fact, some have *only* the nasal, and deleted the following velar obstruent, like Southern Altai (Turkic) "moŋol". No variants delete the nasal but keep the velar obstruent.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB#Mongolian
The point of using "Mugulü" is that it has the "l", but that's not original to the tribal name anyway, so that has no advantage. And it comes at the massive cost of lacking a nasal.
Samoyedic "muŋgu" is a phoneme-for-phoneme dead-ringer for the tribal name, and it follows the exact same semantic development of their neighboring Turkic cousins, from "arrow" to "clan". And those Turkic cousins are using a cognate word for "arrow", both derived from their Samoyedic parent! In the Eastern Steppe, it's a small world after all. ^_^
To emphasize, the ethnonyms Oghur, Oghuz, and Mongol are all cognates, both their root meaning "arrow" and by extension "clan", and their plural suffix. In all 3 cases, the root and suffix come from Samoyedic, particularly the southern range. The semantic development from "arrow" to "clan" was identical for all 3.
ReplyDeleteThis is also a major nail in the coffin of the lazy framework that "Mongolic borrowed from Turkic", which is a common cope in etymologies, probably from the Turkocentric school. If they did, they would have either "r" or "z" or maybe "s" as the final consonant, not their own distinct resolution of that highly problematic plural suffix, which Mongolic chose "l" for. And the Mongolic borrowing would begin with a vowel, not a consonant. Mongolic would have no phonotactic problem with "ok" or "uk" in the singular, or "ogur" or "oguz" in the plural -- and yet they used "muŋgu" in the singular, and eventually "mongol" in the plural.
The Mongolic words, singular and plural, also have the same vowel twice, whereas the Turkic plural (the only form with 2 vowels) has divergent ones, "o" and "u". No reason for Mongolic to avoid that, if they were borrowing. But they did not borrow "mongur", they independently developed "mongol", from shared inherited roots and suffixes -- a cognate, not a borrowing.
Quick note on historical sound changes, before getting to more etymologies.
ReplyDeleteA common theme in Turkic, Mongolic, and probably Tungusic, is Mongolic "h" (velar fricative) corresponding to an earlier "p", which has already been noted in the literature. But the corresponding words in Turkic show no consonant whatsoever.
These both reflect developments from Proto-Samoyedic "p" through various weakening changes in the descendants, including "f" and even "x" in the Southern languages. The "x" was preserved in Mongolic, although earlier in Para-Mongolic it may have still been closer to "p" as in some Samoyedic languages.
In Turkic, Southern Samoyedic "x" weakened to "h" and then deleted altogether, a common loss of initial "h" (or "h" in general).
This is not a typical Uralic sound change -- Samoyedic is the only branch of Uralic that shows weakening of "p", whether to "f" or "x". Hungarian alone in the Ugric branch did this as well, but that must reflect the incorporation of Indo-Euro speakers like Germanic when it was brought to Europe. The Ob-Ugric languages do not weaken "p" to "f". And in any case, Ugric is an eastern branch of Uralic, next to Samoyedic.
Nor does this sound change typify most other language families of Northeast Asia, such as Yukaghir, Nivkh, Eskaleut, etc. -- the ones that look somewhat like Uralic.
Rather, this is characteristic of the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family.
Already during Proto-Na-Dene, labial stops were shifted back to velar or uvular position, although given labialization rather than fricativized. Still, it's a loss of labial stops, and sending them to the back position.
In Japonic, "p" weakened to bilabial "f" during Middle Japanese, and weakened further to "h" during the Early Modern era. Intervocalically, bilabial "f" voiced to "w", and then deleted altogether (except before "a").
In Yeniseian, "p" was more stable than in Wa or Na-Dene, yet some branches show progressive weakening until ultimately reaching "h", as in Ket.
Therefore, during the evolution of Samoyedic, from P-S to the descendants, the original population must have incorporated speakers of Wa-Dene-Yeniseian languages, presumably Yeniseian based on the geography (furthest west branch of W-D-Y). By force of habit, these new converts to Samoyedic carried over their Yeniseian dislike of "p", weakening it toward "f" and even "x".
It's possible this happened to a far lesser degree even further west, when Yeniseian speakers switched to Ugric, which could account for the Hungarian weakening of "p" to "f", if that is not from the European converts. I think most of those Euro converts were Slavic speakers, and Slavic never did have "f", and still does not have "f". So it would have had to come from Germanic, and Hungary was not so heavily Germanic speaking then.
If Hungarian had already weakened "p" to "f" *before* arriving in Europe, then we can exclude Germanic, and point to a Yeniseian influence. I already showed that Proto-Ugric borrowed its word for "horse" from Yeniseian, so maybe some Yeniseian speakers joined the Ugric cultures, and brought along their hard-to-get-rid-of hatred of "p", weakening to "f" -- at least in the southern dialect of Ugric, which became Magyar / Hungarian.
So, the reason why Mongolic (and Tungusic?) are more comfortable keeping "x" or "h", compared to Turkic wanting to delete it, is that Yeniseian influence was strongest in the western range of Altaic, i.e. Turkic.
ReplyDeleteIt was Yeniseian that wanted to weaken "p", which already influenced the evolution of Samoyedic. Although Mongolic draws from its Samoyedic parent, just like Turkic does, Mongolic shows less Yeniseian influence than Turkic does. So Mongolic didn't want to weaken "p" toward "x" and "h" and then nothing.
Turkic was simply taking the trend toward its furthest conclusion, by weakening "x" into "h" during Pre-Proto-Turkic, and deleting "h" altogether for Proto-Turkic. This was a Samoyedic trend, but due to Yeniseian influence, and Turkic received a reinforced / compounded Yeniseian influence due to its proximity to Yeniseian itself. Mongolic and Tungusic only received indirect Yeniseian influence through Samoyedic alone.
Mongolic and Tungusic, being further east, drew more from the other languages of NE Asia, which did not want to weaken "p". Na-Dene was already gone or mostly gone. And Wa was already migrating into Korea and Japan, by the mid-to-late 1st millennium BC. So, the eastern languages that influenced Mongolic and Tungusic, likely excluded Wa / Japonic, or only weakly influenced by it. Probably they drew more from Nivkh, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, maybe Yukaghir.
Or Samoyedic speakers from an "f" dialect could have migrated to join an Ugric culture, and that led to "f" in Hungarian, which had already taken place before written records of the language in the late 1st millennium AD.
ReplyDeleteI still think those "f" dialect Samoyedic speakers were recent former Yeniseian speakers, so it's Yeniseian influence one way or the other, for Hungarian "f".
OK, now for a major etymology, on the topic of cattle -- if it's not horses, what else is there to talk about in the Eastern Steppe? Well, maybe reindeer... ^_^
ReplyDeleteThe P-T word for "ox, bull" -- *male* cow -- is "öküŕ".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/%C3%B6k%C3%BC%C5%95
The corresponding word in P-M is "hüker", from earlier "höker".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Mongolic/h%C3%BCker
Wiktionary falsely claims that the Mongolic word was "borrowed" from P-T "höküŕ", but that is impossible cuz P-T does not have a back fricative at all in its phoneme inventory, and the reconstructed P-T word clearly begins with a vowel, not a consonant of any kind. There is no reason to insert a prothetic "h" there in Mongolic, so yet again, we nail the coffin shut on the delusional Turkocentric view that Mongolic merely borrowed all its words from Turkic.
However, Wiktionary does helpfully note that Vovin reads a word from the 6th-C AD Bugut inscription in Mongolia, as "pü[ker]-ner", interpreted as "oxen", and supposedly from a Rouran language, i.e. Para-Mongolic. Assuming that is correct, this points to the "p"-like origins of Mongolic "h", a development carried over from its Samoyedic parent, originally under Yeniseian influence.
So, these both must be cognates descended a Proto-Samoyedic word beginning with "p", which may have changed to "x" in the Southern dialects. Mongolic ended up keeping the "x" (transcribed as "h"), whereas Turkic weakened it to "h" and deleted it.
Notice -- we are not tempted to fall for the Indo-Euro-centric delusion that these Turkic and Mongolic words are related to P-IE "uksḗn" (or any I-E reflex of that), which given the initial vowel rather than consonant, cannot be of native I-E origin anyway. Nor for related forms in other languages of Central Eurasia, such as Proto-Kartvelian "usx", Proto-Nakh (NE Caucasian) "ustu", or even the loanwords / substrate adoptions in West Uralic languages like "uškɜ".
That group of words begins with a vowel vs. the Altaic word beginning with a consonant (deleted in Turkic). That group has a medial sibilant vs. no sibilant in the Altaic word. And there is a medial sequence of consonants that are not in the same place (aside from "ustu"), vs. just 1 medial consonant in the Altaic word -- although, as we'll see, it used to have a sequence of consonants, but they're in the same place, and neither was a sibilant.
I think that I-E / Uralic / Caucasus group of words must be of Crescentine origin, based on the "šk" sequence in Uralic, which looks like the Pre-Uralic substrate in Finno-Volga-land. True, the descendants of Uralic which have this word, may have borrowed it via Indo-Iranian -- but I-I did not get this from a native I-E word, since it begins with a vowel.
Also, the I-E word is the only one in the group with "ks" rather than "sk", so it's likely "sk" was original, and very typical of the Crescentine substrate in F-V-land.
I'll have to see what I can find in Pre-Greek, Hattic, Etruscan, the Pre-Semitic substrate in NW Semitic and Arabic, or Sumerian. The point for now is that the Altaic word does not belong to this group.
Ready for a crazy whirlwind tour through Samoyedic, Yeniseian, and Altaic? And maybe the Xiongnu and Huns??? Here we go!
ReplyDeleteThe mystery-unlocking word from P-S is "päŋkär", which means "shaman's drum". In the southern language, Mator, it's "höŋgür ~ hüŋgür", with the telltale weakening of "p" to "h" (the transcription for "x", as with Mongolic). I'll get to the semantic relationship later, and start with the phonetic side.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/p%C3%A4%C5%8Bk%C3%A4r
Both vowels match perfectly to P-T "öküŕ". For P-M, the 1st vowel is perfect, and the 2nd vowel lowered to "e" for some reason I don't understand -- but anybody's theory has to accept this irregular vowel correspondence between the P-T and P-M words.
The initial consonant was preserved in P-M, although weakened to "h" and deleted in P-T, both reflecting language-wide trends, not ad hoc for this word.
As for the sequence "ŋg", we already saw this simplify to just "k" in P-T, where P-S "muŋkə" / Mator "muŋgu" = "arrow", became "ok" (or "uk") in P-T. So, before a velar stop, the velar nasal is deleted / absorbed into the following stop, going from P-S or a southern dialect into P-T.
Pre-P-M "höker" also simplified this sequence to "k", unlike what we saw earlier, where "mongol" preserved both the nasal and the velar stop, from the same P-S / Mator word "muŋkə" / "muŋgu".
Maybe this is conditioned phonologically somehow, like the preceding vowel being front vs. back?
Maybe it reflects variation in the source dialects, where some Samoyedic languages have deleted the nasal (Upper Ob dialect of Southern Selkup, and Forest Enets).
Or maybe it was a borrowing, not from P-T, but from the stage where the Southern Samoyedic languages were creolizing into Pre-PT, after the Turkic-like deletion of the nasal, but before the initial consonant had been deleted.
Or maybe it's an irregular nasal deletion in Mongolic.
The correspondence between P-T "ŕ" and P-M "r" is not the same as we saw for the cognate ethnonyms "oguŕ" vs. "mongol". That "ŕ" is highly problematic, though, so it may not have led to a regular correspondence in Mongolic.
All right, what's the semantic connection between cattle and "shaman's drum"? Well, these drums are made from a wooden frame, with an animal hide stretched over the top. The hide is the part that you hit with the striker, or perhaps with your hand in other contexts. The hide is the most salient part of the drum, not its frame, not its striker.
ReplyDeleteAnimal hides derive their names from the name of the animal that they're taken from.
Sadly, there is no surviving reflex of this animal name in Samoyedic, although it must have been "päŋkə", to give it typical Uralic word shape CVCCV, and where the final "r" is some kind of nominalizing suffix, perhaps for instruments.
MIRACULOUSLY, this word *is* preserved in its non-Uralic neighbor, good ol' Proto-Yeniseian! This word is so old, it got lost as an animal name during Samoyedic, and was borrowed way back during P-Y.
In P-Y it is "pʰaŋgʌ" -- without the final "r" -- and it means "female animal", whose reflexes refer to dog, horse, and... deer!
This is a monomorpheme, not a compound, not having affixes, etc. So it violates the standard word shape of Yeniseian, which is CVC. Sometimes either consonant can be left off, but never are 2 vowels allowed in a single morpheme. However, this word shape is entirely standard in Uralic, including Proto-Samoyedic.
And whaddaya know? It's exactly, phoneme-for-phoneme, what we were searching for!
So now we have a solid basis for the P-S word for "shaman's drum", which has a suffix related to it being an instrument, and a root referring to the animal itself. From its loan into P-Y, we can tell it was a female-specific term, but still, referring to some large-ish domesticated animal, not a wild one. Given the nature of Samoyedic shaman's drums, which are made from reindeer skins, it must have referred to reindeer specifically at first, then generalized to "female of any animal".
The suffix "r" is a tool / instrument / artefact suffix in P-S. It occurs in 3 other nouns that have 2 vowels (to eliminate cases like "CV-r", where an earlier final vowel deleted, and "r" is not a suffix). These are "kiətär" = "window", "potɜr" = "strap", and "nakur" = "three". 2 of those 3 are artefacts, and the etymology of "nakur" is unknown, so it may be alluding to the number by means of some tool that has 3 prominent things (like a fork). So it's no surprise to see the "r" suffix on the word for "shaman's drum" as well.
Entry on P-Y word for "female animal", BTW:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/p%CA%B0a%C5%8Bg%CA%8C
Samoyedic cultures are primarily reindeer herders in the north, although in the Sayan region they herded cattle and horses instead. And yet, the shaman's drums in these Sayan cultures were still made from deerskin or sometimes horsehide, not cowhide.
ReplyDeleteSo what specifically did Altaic borrow, when it needed a word for "ox, bull"? In any case, it will involve a shift from "deer" to "bovine species", but they're both large animals with hooves, a fine semantic shift.
There are 2 possible paths.
First, they used the Samoyedic word for "shaman's drum", including the suffix. Phonetically, the suffix is usually "r", but in Forest Nenets it is "ł", so perhaps this variation in the dialects led to P-T using the exotic "ŕ" rather than plain "r". Mongolic, being further away from the full range of Samoyedic, only heard the forms with "r", and chose plain "r".
Semantically, this path is more opaque, since the senses shift from "drum" -> "skin used on the drum" -> "animal that the skin is taken from". And this inverts the natural order of semantic shifts, which begin with natural objects, and progress toward processing of their parts, and then assembly into tools or instruments. They would be trying to unwind the history of their language, to see what their ancestors used to call "(female) reindeer", rather than coining a word solely on the basis of the here-and-now.
Alternatively, they used the Yeniseian loan of the Samoyedic word, which already refers to a variety of large animal species. The only semantic shift is narrowing it to "bovine", and inverting the gender from "female" to "male". That's far easier to do in the here-and-now, and does not involve the shaman's drum in the semantic development.
Phonetically, the Yeniseian loan is a perfect copy of the P-S donor. Then the typical Southern Samoyedic dialects would weaken initial "p" to "x", just as they did in the cognate term for "shaman's drum". All that remains is adding the final consonant, which is "ŕ" in P-T and "r" in P-M.
These choices have precedents elsewhere in the proto-languages, for animal names. One relevant example for P-T is "kunduŕ" = "beaver", which looks like the Proto-Ugric word for it, "kuntɜ", with P-T only attaching final "ŕ".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/kundu%C5%95
As for Yeniseian animal names loaned into Turkic languages, there's P-Y "kun" = "wolverine", which was loaned into Kipchak Turkic, e.g. "qunuw" (ditto) in Kazakh.
So, this seems like the path taken to get the P-T and P-M words for "ox".
Also, the Southern dialects of Samoyedic would have applied the same vowel changes to the Yeniseian word for "female animal", just as they did to the cognate Samoyedic word for "shaman's drum".
ReplyDeleteTo end on a breif speculative note, it's possible that these words are the source of the ethnonyms Xiongnu and Hun, both of which usually assume something like "xoŋ" or "hoŋ" in the first syllable. That would reflect Mongolic developments, where "x" was preserved rather than weakened and deleted in Turkic. It would also be typical of Mongolic to preserve the medial nasal, whereas Turkic wanted to fuse it into the following consonant.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there's no following "k" or "g" in the ethnonyms, despite it being in the Samoyedic source and the Yeniseian loan as well. And Mongolic preferred to keep that, as in "mongol" itself. There's no Samoyedic dialect that kept the nasal but deleted the following consonant, to serve as a model.
Perhaps Xiongnu was a compound, not referring to themselves as though they were simply oxen or bulls. This ethnonym has a 2nd element "na", after "xoŋ". I find no plausible candidates in Turkic or Mongolic, but there's Proto-Tungusic "nā" = "earth, land", which may have a related / cognate word in Korean "nara" (ditto).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Tungusic/n%C4%81
Then during the swirling environment of Altaic creolization, both of these terms were used by one tribe, somewhere in the east where Mongolic and Tungusic would come to predominate. First it would've been a toponym, "cattle country" -- or the country where some other large livestock animal was herded, if they narrowed the Yeniseian word to a non-bovine species. Then the Chinese referred to the people using the toponym for where they lived.
The later "Hun" term relied on place assimilation for the two nasals, resulting in a geminate "nn", but otherwise being the same. And in Greek, giving an ending with "oi" as is typical of their ethnonyms that end in a plural, and just "i" in Latin.
Not entirely convinced of this, but worth considering. At any rate, it sounds better than the only etymology listed at Wikipedia for Xiongnu, which is that it's from the Ongi River in Mongolia. That Mongolic word lacks an initial consonant, and Mongolic is fine with initial consonants, including "x" / "h", so I reject that on phonetic grounds. On semantic grounds, I doubt a Steppe pastoralist culture named themselves after a river -- their main environment is the grassland or hills, they're not riverine fishermen or river-valley agriculturalists.
So far, my theory is the best -- but that's not saying much. I choose to believe it until something better comes along. ^_^
Forgot to mention the final phonetic link in the chain. Assuming the Xiongnu's name is a compound, that could have resulted in a sequence of 3 consonants, like "xoŋgna", and this was illegal, so the "g" was deleted to make it euphonic, with 2 nasals in a row.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, there was a weak final vowel in the 1st element, yielding "xoŋgVna", but this weakened to the point of deletion due to being unstressed, and that's what caused the 3-consonant sequence, which was then resolved by deleting the "g" as I said above.
The suffix "r" was not added to the root of the animal name, as it was in Turkic and perhaps Mongolic. Animal names ending in "r" are much rarer in Mongolic than in Turkic. So although one path led to the attested Mongolic forms ending in "r", another during Para-Mongolic did not add the "r", perhaps being under less Turkic-like influence since it was further east.
The Samoyedic animal word underlying the attested word for "shaman's drum", may have still existed back when the P-T and P-M words were being inherited during creolization. Since then, it has disappeared from the surviving Samoyedic descendants, but maybe it got replaced by terms from other languages, or other Samoyedic words, euphemisms, etc.
ReplyDeleteJust look at what happened to the P-IE word for "horse" during the Dark Ages. If you only had access to I-E languages from the same period that there's recordings of Samoyedic, you'd never know about the "hekus" word for "horse", only the vast variety of replacements since the Dark Ages.
The fact that the attested Samoyedic languages still have the animal word hiding out inside of a compound, suggests that the basic animal word was removed from the language for whatever reason. Hiding inside of a compound escapes this removal process, since it's hard to see inside a complex word. It's not even a compound, though, it just has an instrument noun suffix added on.
So it's an archaism that only persists in the instrument, cuz of its sacred and traditional place in their culture, the shaman's drum can't be re-named willy nilly, just cuz they're replacing the name for "deer". Like the high-status Roman title "equestrian", which persisted into Italian (and loaned into English), despite being replaced by "caballus" as the basic name.
This simplifies the transmission route of the Turkic and Mongolic terms, and the telltale sign of an otherwise unattested word hiding out in a morphologically complex term, means it used to be there as a basic word but has vanished by the time of the attested reflexes.
It surely would've been reinforced by the fact that Yeniseian speakers were the other half of the creole parents, since they had the Samoyedic animal word as a loan, and phoneme-for-phoneme the same.
Just saying, we don't need to assume transmission via Yeniseian, if it used to exist in Samoyedic languages of the mid-late 1st millennium BC, and only vanished among them during the Dark Ages or Modern era, as with Indo-Euro "hekus".
Quick view on historical sound changes related to Yeniseian, Turkic, and Japonic.
ReplyDeleteFirst, to wrap up discussion on the weakening of "p" in the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family, there's some ambiguity about whether Kamassian had glottal fricatives or velar fricatives. Klumpp's reconstruction says glottal, Künnap's says velar. So that's evidence that in Sayan Samoyedic, "x" was already weakening to "h". Definitely Yeniseian influence, and this is in a totally Samoyedic language, not a creole like Turkic. Yeniseian speakers were already being incorporated into the Samoyedic speech community, before creolization created the Turkic language family.
Also, a reminder that in contemporary Japanese, the deletion of word-initial "h" is already being used for comedic effect. Subaru from Hololive has a trademark greeting for her streams -- "ajimaru", which has deleted initial "h" from "hajimaru", which traces back to something like "patimaru" in Proto-Japonic. Who knows -- she's popular enough that she could start a nationwide trend that will eventually eliminate "h" from the beginning of words in Future Japanese! ^_^
Next, on the emergence of the exotic liquids in Proto-Turkic, "ŕ" and "ĺ", whose reflexes are "r" and "l" in Oghur, but "s" and "š" in Common Turkic. These phonemes must have been introduced by speakers of a language with a voiceless lateral fricative, "ɬ", whose resolution can go in the sibilant direction or the liquid approximant direction, which is the split shown in the Turkic branches.
Proto-Yeniseian has this phoneme, as well as affricate "tɬ", unlike the other neary ancient language families of NE Asia. It's not in Uralic, nor is it in Proto-Samoyedic. The palatalized liquid "ľ" is transcribed for Proto-Uralic, but few accept it as a phoneme. Also, it's not a fricative.
In the Nenets descendant of P-S, there is "ɬ", probably from incorporating neighboring Yeniseian speakers, who by force of habit brought this phoneme with them. At first, it's "speaking Samoyedic with a Yeniseian accent", but after centuries, this becomes the new norm, nobody thinks it sounds exotic anymore, and it's a native phoneme of the language.
The exact same process must have happened in the Sayan Samoyedic languages, but instead of Yeniseians merely adopting Samoyedic and speaking with a foreign accent and introducing "ɬ" into Mator or Kamassian, they created a new creole language that was heavily based on Sayan Samoyedic. So, the exotic lateral was introduced into the proto-stage of this creole, not into the Sayan Samoyedic parent of the creole.
However, this was such an exotic sound for the speakers who did not come from a Yeniseian background, that they had to resolve it into something they could pronounce. Hence the split into "r" and "l", or "s" and "š". P-S already included "r", "l", and "s", so only "š" needed to be introduced for Common Turkic -- but that already existed in a few descendants of P-S, so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility for native Samoyedic speakers to adopt, as opposed to "ɬ" which also changes the air-flow to lateral, and was far too strange for native Samoyedic speakers.
Last, about Crescentine influence in West Uralic -- "š" only exists as a phoneme in some Western Uralic languages, not P-S and probably therefore not in P-U. I attribute its emergence in the West to the incorporation of Crescentine speakers, whose languages have both "s" and "š" -- Etruscan, Pre-Greek, Hattic, Sumerian, etc. Some of these speakers wandered up into the Cucuteni-like cultures of the Copper Age and spread their language there, which is preserved in the Pre-Uralic substrate of Finno-Volga-land.
ReplyDeleteThe only other family in the region is Proto-Indo-European, and it only had "s", as did most of its early descendants. So there's nowhere else it could have come from, to enter West Uralic. The Crescentine speakers of F-V-land had such a strong habit of using two sibilants, that this foreign accent carried over when they adopted Uralic languages, and eventually that became the new standard, and they became distinct phonemes, not just a foreign accent.
Reminder, like Japonic, Proto-Yeniseian only has 1 liquid approximant, "r", although it has lateral fricatives. Na-Dene languages don't even have "r", although they have lateral fricatives.
ReplyDeleteSo, the elimination / weakness of liquid approximants in Japonic is another shibboleth it shares with Na-Dene and Yeniseian.
Korean also has just 1 liquid, but I attribute that to W-D-Y influence of some kind, presumably Japonic.
Ainu has only 1 liquid, "r", but its proto-stage has 2 distinct liquids, and that owes to its Uralic inheritance. It only lost the "l"-like liquid under Japonic influence. Not only did Jomon natives switch to Japonic, some Wa people joined the Emishi and switched to their Ainu-like language. They "went native", but brought some of their foreign Wa accent with them, whose most striking feature was inability to distinguish liquid consonants, resulting in only "r" among attested Ainu.
The various Uralo-Siberian-type languages, and Nivkh, have 2 liquid approximants.
These two mega-families have been neighbors and migrating around near each other, for literally thousands of years, spanning vast distances. And yet, they still have their telltale shibboleths -- areal schmereal. Whether they're related uni-parentally, or as half-sibling creoles, the point is that one group is coherent and stable, and so is the other group.
Getting back to Altaic, all 3 members (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic), have 2 liquids, not 1. This places them within the Uralo-Siberian mega-family. Turkic shows the heaviest Yeniseian influence, namely the exotic liquids in P-T, but that didn't last very long. Farther from the Yeniseian homeland, Mongolic and Tungusic never showed such a strong Yeniseian influence.
Despite being surrounded by 2-liquid speakers for thousands of years, Glorious Nippon proudly continues the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian tradition of only using 1 liquid at most. Areal schmereal! Old habits die hard, and some shibboleths are too important to cultural identity to throw away just to appease the new neighbors. ^_^
OK, Altaicists had already figured out the "weakening of 'p'" correspondence, where "p" or "h" appear in the east like Tungusic and Mongolic, but as zero in Turkic, and that this must trace to an ancestral "p" that was weakened. It's name is Ramstedt-Pelliot's Law, and I independently re-discovered it -- great minds think alike.
ReplyDeleteHowever, they did not discover its origin in the Samoyedic branch of Uralic, especially the Sayan languages. I discovered this as a general sound change that is shared by both the Sayan Samoyedic languages and Altaic languages -- as well as providing *lexical* origins of Altaic words in Samoyedic, especially the Sayan dialects.
Those crucial pieces were missing, and they thought that the Altaic languages descended from a Proto-Altaic ancestor that did not necessarily belong to an existing family, like Uralic or Samoyedic.
I am happy to re-discover things -- it shows how true they are, although not how original or creative I am.
But I am even happier to discover new things -- it puts my originality and creativity to good use.
Look forward to more Samoyedic -> Altaic etymologies tonight. ^_^
Let's "warm up" with a verb -- for "thaw, melt". Verbs are less likely to be borrowed than nouns, so we're looking at more word classes that descend from a shared ancestor.
ReplyDeleteIn Proto-Turkic, "to thaw, melt" (intransitive) is "ẹri". In Yakut, it also means "to warm up" (intransitive).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/erimek
In Proto-Mongolic, the root of "to melt" is "hail", reflected in Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmyk, and Daur. Only Monguor has an initial stop, "qayil". Some linguists would conclude, based on Monguor, that the P-M ancestor must have begun with a stop, "k", not fricative "h". I reject that in this case, on the external comparisons to Proto-Turkic and their Samoyedic parent. Maybe this is just one irregular case where Monguor gives the wrong answer, maybe this is systematic and will require over-hauling the reconstruction of P-M, considering its Samoyedic parent.
So here we have a case of P-T beginning with a vowel, and P-M beginning with "h" (ultimately from "p"). The next consonant is a liquid, the intervening vowel is high-ish and front, although P-M also has "a" before, creating a diphthong or sequence.
The origin lies in Proto-Samoyedic "pirä" = "to cook" (transitive). It's of P-U origin, not a borrowing.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/pir%C3%A4-
During creolization, this was likely contaminated by P-S "pərå" = "to burn", since the word shape is the same, consonants are the same, but the vowels are back rather than front (perhaps the creolizers thought these two P-S words were vowel-alternated cognates).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/p%C9%99r%C3%A5-
The attested forms of "pirä" don't begin with "h", but they do in Mator for "pərå". Both have some forms showing "l" instead of "r", or there's some phonological rule I don't know yet that makes P-M choose "l" instead of "r", or it's a general preference in P-M (as in choosing "l" for ending "mongol" vs. "r" to end "oghur"). The unusual "a" in the P-M word likely came from "pərå", several of whose reflexes have "a", including Mator.
Both cooking and burning involve applying heat to something, which if it's solid, will thaw or melt.
Why was a transitive verb in P-S treated as an intransitive verb in P-T and P-M, without any change to its morphology? Probably cuz its shape, CVCV, makes it look morphologically simple in Uralic and Samoyedic, whose preferred shape is CVCCV or CVCV. But in this case, the "pi" in "pirä" is a rare verbal root of shape CV, and "rä" is a suffix.
During creolization, this was re-analyzed as an atomic word based on its shape, and assumed to be intransitive since it didn't have any *apparent* suffixes to indicate transitivizing. So it was de-transitivized in meaning, without altering its word shape, during its inheritance into P-T and P-M.
Now that's what I call a warm-up exercise! ^_^
Next, the word for "friend, companion" in Samoyedic was inherited into Turkic and Mongolic (and maybe Tungusic). In P-Turk it's "ẹ̄ĺ".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C9%99%C5%9F
In Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmyk, and Daur, it's "han' " or "hani", both suggesting a palatal nasal in P-M. It's used more for "spouse" than "friend", whose standard word became P-M "nökör".
In Evenki, Castren recorded an alternation between "häŋä ~ äŋä" for "friend, companion", suggesting it's part of the broader weakening of original "p". But it's hard to say when the "p" weakened to "h" -- if it's like Mongolic, it could've been "h" already during P-Tung, and it was originally "p" during the purely Samoyedic era.
These all descend from P-S "pälä" = "half, side", later meaning "one item of a pair", and in certain descendants, "friend", in the sense of "the person who forms a pair with someone else". That also leads to "spouse", which even in English is referred to as someone's "better half". The derived verb "pälätä" = "to help" reveals the connection to "friend". This word is of P-U origin, not a borrowing.
Nearly half of the reflexes have palatalized "l", and 1 has "r", although none are in the Sayan dialects. That could be why P-Turk used the palatalized "l" rather than plain "l".
In the Selkup branch it's "peläŋ", which creolizers may have re-analyzed into standard Samoyedic word shape for 3 C's and 2 V's, as "*pelŋä". P-Tung may have resolved the unusual sequence by just taking the "ŋ". P-M may have resolved it by fusing features of the 2 -- a nasal with the palatal location of "l", namely "n' ".
In the Sayan dialects, the 1st vowel is high-front in Kamassian, but low in Mator -- could account for the variation between P-Turk vs. P-M and P-Tung.
The final vowel sometimes deletes (Kamassian), so perhaps that's what P-Turk heard. Otherwise it's low-front, which is what shows up in P-M and P-Tung.
The "p" has already weakened to "h" in Mator, though it's stop in Kamassian. Weakening has begun, at any rate.
What's revealing about this one is that the sense of "friend" only comes at the stage of descendants of P-S, not P-S or P-U -- and browsing around the other reflexes of the P-U word in Finnic, etc., it doesn't look like most other branches of Uralic developed the sense of "friend", just "half".
So it specifically points to Samoyedic rather than Uralic in general as one key parent of the Altaic creoles, and that these creoles must have developed after P-S had already begun to break up into several languages. Samoyedic is the oldest branch of Uralic (unless Ainu is older), but the divergence of Sayan vs. Northern languages is a younger date. And that's just one parent of the Altaic creoles, which only cohered some time after that.
Whatever other military, political, and cultural ties may have developed at an earlier stage, among the people who would later create the Altaic creoles, the linguistic aspect of this cultural inter-mixture seems to have happened later.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/p%C3%A4l%C3%A4
ReplyDeleteOn the ethnogenesis of the Altaic cultures. Why did their separate cultures all feel like fusing into one great big Eastern Steppe confederation, to such an extent that they would creolize their languages? That's quite a commitment to a shared future together -- you can't undo creolization and get back your separate languages. Once two parents make a baby, the baby cannot be reversed into two separate parents.
ReplyDeleteWell, the creolization seems to have begun during the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BC, during the era of the Donghu, Xiongnu, and Xianbei, who all caught the attention of China to their south. The earliest culture there is Donghu, who began around 700 BC.
I don't think China had anything to do with this, though. China only gets inter-tangled with the Steppe people when the Steppe people make the first move against China. Before then, China was a Southeast Asian culture, and the nature of its internal fragmentation always sees Southern China breaking away, then being re-integrated. China has huge diaspora populations throughout Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Its language family, Sino-Tibetan, is mainly Southeast Asian.
The Zhou Dynasty was contemporaneous with the Donghu, and the Zhou is too far east and south to matter to Steppe people. Likewise for the preceding Shang Dynasty. Those two would have only bothered people in Manchuria, not Mongolia or the Altai-Sayan region, or the western side of the Sayan Mountain pass.
Since Samoyedic is the major uniting language underlying Altaic, and Yeniseian plays a crucial role of re-analyzing, introducing new phonemes, new phonotactics, etc., that points to the Altai-Sayan region being the epicenter of Altaic ethnogenesis. If anything, the region just to the west of the Sayan Mountains, west of Lake Baikal, not far east into Manchuria.
Applying the meta-ethnic frontier model of ethnogenesis, which radically alien and hostile culture showed up in that region leading up to the Donghu and its successors? Why, the Indo-Iranians of the Andronovo culture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andronovo_culture
They spoke a totally foreign family of languages (Indo-Euro, not Uralic or Yeniseian). They brought a totally foreign religion with them (what later evolved into Vedic Hinduism and Zoroastrianism). They were semi-nomadic, but not purely nomadic like the Yeniseian and Samoyedic speakers -- Indo-Iranians preferred building heavily fortified settlements, not being constantly on the move in tents or yurts. And they used horses to pull wagons, which they used for warfare as well -- chariots. That was the total opposite use of the horse as Yeniseians and Samoyedic speakers used -- riding on horseback.
So, apart from being very different on the major cultural in-group badges, they were incredibly hostile and warlike, not friendly new neighbors you want to invite over for a round of kumis...
This should have triggered a massive cohesion effort on the receiving end of the invasion -- and it did. It brought together all sorts of locals, and some even further away, who were all in the cross-hairs of the charioteers. Either we all unite against them, or they will pick us off one by one...
ReplyDeleteThe Andronovo began around 2000 BC and lasted until 1100 BC. This was the first time a meta-ethnic nemesis had shown up in the Eastern Steppe, coming from the West, in such warlike fashion. So at first the Andronovo must have caught the locals with their pants down. But as the central state-dominant era that they belonged to gave way to the nomad-dominant phase of the cycle (circa 1700 BC to 700 BC), the nomads unified into a confederation to expel the invaders.
The first major cultural fusion among Eastern Steppe people was the Deer Stones culture, who showed up in 1400 BC and lasted until 700 BC, lasting for most of the nomad-dominant phase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_stones_culture
They are responsible for driving out the Andronovo invaders, who left zero Indo-Iranian cultural descendants in the region -- not their language, religion, chariot, or fortified settlement living pattern. And not many demographic descendants either, as they all beat a hasty retreat south into the Hindu Kush and Iranian Plateau, where they would forever be safe from the horse-riding archer nomad confederations of Altai. Anyone who remained got genetically and culturally absorbed into the Deer Stones culture and its descendants.
Riding high after their expulsion of the Indo-Iranian nemesis, they spawned spin-off cultures or imitator cultures to the west (Pazyryk) and east (Slab Grave), both carrying the torch of Eastern Steppe nomad unity. They remained so cohesive and fiercely defensive against Indo-Iranians, that not even the Achaemenid Empire -- controlling 40% of the world's population at the time -- dared to venture up to the Sayan Mountains. In fact, Cyrus himself was slain in battle against the Massagetae, led by a woman Tomyris, long before they could have reached that far north.
As with the Scythians in the Western Steppe, the Massagetae spoke Uralic, proven by the "o" in Tomyris' name -- both "e" and "o" vanished by the Proto-Indo-Iranian stage, and would not return until Medieval times. But it was present in Uralic languages, like the Mordvinic one spoken by the Scythians (endonym: "Sokoltoi", with several "o"s plus "l", which was also lost during P-II and not recovered until Medieval times, but preserved all that time in Uralic).
ReplyDeleteGiven her location and Amazon-like role, she surely spoke Uralic, too, likely Sayan Samoyedic. It could not have been Yeniseian or Proto-Turkic, since Massagetae begins with a nasal consonant -- and you guys thought you couldn't unlock the mysteries of the ancients with something as simple as phonotactics! ^_^
Y'know, she could've been Wa for all we know -- they're Amazons, too, and the only thing non-Japonic about Massagetae and Tomyris is the "g". The syllable structure is very open, too, no consonant sequences or clusters, only that word-final "s" in her name, and Japanese has always treated "u" as a bit weak -- maybe she was named Tomurisu! She is AKA Tomiride -- 4 CV syllables in a row -- so who knows? ^_^
I'm only half-joking, but it's more based on the evidence than viewing her as Indo-European of any kind. No way in hell. She was carrying on the proud Deer Stones tradition of being a bulwark against the Indo-Europeans, who would never contest the Sayan region until the Russian Empire's conquest of Kazakhstan over 2000 years later, in the 1800s. And even that proved to be short-lived, with the collapse of the Russian Empire by 2000. No more Kazakhstan, and they never had Mongolia even at their peak.
So the Russian Empire was acting like a Neo-Andronovo culture in the Sayan region, but since they didn't last too long, it didn't put that much pressure on the locals. 100 years is not intolerable, it's only a few generations. But it's still a meta-ethnic frontier, given the languages, religions, subsistence modes, and other cultural markers of the region. By 2300, when the cycle shifts back to nomad-dominant, there could be another major backlash against the Indo-Euro invaders of the Eastern Steppe.
Getting back to the linguistic aspect of the Deer Stones culture, I don't think they started the creolization process among themselves. They were the 1st such confederation -- they spoke separate languages, with interpreters, and a lingua franca, which must have been Sayan Samoyedic, given who led the linguist way forward after them.
ReplyDeleteI think creolization began in earnest with the successors to the Deer Stones, like Pazyryk and Slab Grave, where the people felt like their ancestors unified stand against the charioteers should not just fade away, and the successors should more fully unify, integrate, and homogenize their cultures, to seal their cohesive fate, rather than disband into a zillion fragmented tribes who will get picked off by the next wave of Indo-European invaders.
At first, they probably just kept using the old lingua franca, Samoyedic. But given that they came from totally different families -- Uralic and Yeniseian -- creolization made better sense, so that neither side felt subordinate to the other. That may be tolerated by sedentary civilizations, where class stratification or caste systems are normal. But not among otherwise anarchic nomad societies. The best way to please all sides is to simply fuse everyone's cultures together.
Only after their intense cohesion, brought about by their confrontation with the Indo-Iranians, did Eastern Steppe people start to unify and threaten the lands to the north of China, and catch the attention of the Chinese.
It's also possible that during the initial stage of the Indo-Iranian invasion of Altai, the locals went fleeing through the Sayan Mountain pass and into Mongolia and Manchuria. That then could have created a domino effect to the east and south, or to the east and north for that matter -- anywhere away from the main battle zone.
This would have brought Uralic, and Samoyedic particularly, quite far east of its homeland, among refugees. But, far from melting into the locals and adopting their ways, they were just temporarily re-grouping, to lead a counter-charge against the invaders. And the locals must have heard about this, seen them after their victory, and decided they were worthy role models and leaders. That is why people from Eastern Mongolia and Manchuria decided to cast their lot with the Samoyedic-Yeniseian fusion of the Sayan region further west.
If only the Indo-Iranians had quit while they were ahead after the Sintashta culture... but no, they had to go for the gold, defying the east-to-west headwinds of global influence. For their hubris, they were stricken down away from the noble Steppe forever, by agents of karma, whose existence they themselves brought about -- the Altaics, who would act as the "scourge of God" many times over against the West, to punish their vainglory.
Just you wait -- when 2300 rolls around, and there's no more gas or electricity, but there's still grass to power horses, the Neo-Deer Stones cultures are going to run wild all over the collapsing West. The wheel of karma keeps on turning, punishing decadent civilizations with purifying noble savages.
edit: Skolotoi
ReplyDeleteAnother possible Tungusic word from the Samoyedic word for "half" -> "one member of a pair", is P-Tung "pańan" = "shadow". This has a noun suffix "-n", so the root is "pańa", which could be cognate with the Mongolic words like "hań".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Tungusic/pa%C5%84an
Semantically, a shadow is one member of an inseparable pair, with the other member being the object casting the shadow.
I don't see other P-Tung words relating to "darkness" that begin with "pa" or "xa", so I don't think their word for "shadow" comes from a word for "dark". It's likely a semantic shift from "companion" -> "shadow", which follows you everywhere you go like a friend or companion.
If true, this example shows no weakening of "p" in P-Tung, although most descendants do weaken it. Still, it suggests that at the P-Tung stage, "p"-weakening was not as intense as it was in P-Turk or P-M. That would be explained by proximity to Yeniseian, which is the origin of this sound change. Turkic is closest, and it eliminated the consonant altogether. Mongolic is intermediate, and it weakened it to "x / h". Tungusic is furthest away, and it may have weakened it in some cases, but kept it as "p" in other cases.
Turkic and Mongolic word for "honey" is Uralic word for "sap". In P-T and likely P-M, it's "bal" (no attested cognates in Tungusic). As usual, we ignore the Turkocentric claim that Mongolic borrowed all its words from Turkic. Rather, they must share a common ancestor.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/bal
I don't think Altaicists have figured out that "b" in Turkic and Mongolic traces back to earlier "w" -- most of the Altaic etymologies I've seen for words with "b" in them, assume they're related to earlier "p". So I think I'm the first to discover that they originate in "w" and were hardened, which explains the strange gaps / asymmetries in their consonant inventories (or which consonants can begin a word in P-T), which look exactly like the evolution of Samoyedic languages. I'm certainly the first to point to the Samoyedic origin of such sound changes and phoneme inventories, and to provide Yeniseian-influenced Samoyedic etymologies for words in Turkic and Mongolic.
So, both P-T and P-M words for "honey" must come from a Samoyedic or Uralic word that looks like "wal", whose "w" shows the typically Sayan Samoyedic trend of hardening it into "b". Presumably the Uralic word had a final vowel that was weakened and deleted due to being unstressed, already in a Uralic / Samoyedic reflex.
The "a" in Altaic could trace back to either low vowel of Uralic, back "a" or front "ä". Yeniseian languages do not distinguish between front and back vowels, at the low height, only at mid and high height. So they carried their foreign accent into the creolization process, and merged both into their own familiar "a".
The answer is there in Uralic, but it's a bit tangled by the fact that it's probably not a Proto-Uralic word, but adopted from a substrate like Crescentine or maybe some hunter-gatherer language. It shows irregularities in the presence or nature of the final vowel, and presence or nature of the initial consonant.
Nevertheless, they all mean the same thing originally -- "sap", from plants. Some shifted it to mean "milk". In some Samoyedic languages (Selkup), it even includes "drink" and "alcoholic spirits" -- which make it close to the honey-based alcoholic drink "mead". Semantically, "honey" is a sticky viscuous substance, which can be processed to be edible by people, and comes from a flora-and-fauna source.
It's "älɜ" in Sami, Ugric, and Samoyedic. It's "jälte" in Finnic and Permic. And lo and behold, in Mari it's "wə̑ĺe" (see comment in "älɜ"), which suggests an earlier form like "wälɜ".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=40
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1243
It looks like the VCV shape is original, and some branches inserted a prothetic glide at the start to ease pronunciation. VCV is a highly unusual word shape for Uralic, unless it's a kin term, or a flora-and-fauna term -- which suggests the latter are adoptions of substrate words from another family that is happy with VCV shape, like Crescentine.
There are no Southern Samoyedic reflexes of this word, in any sense, so unfortunately we have to make an educated guess that they inserted "w" like Mari, which they later hardened to "b". Or that they borrowed the Mari word, and hardened "w" to "b" as usual. Either way, this must have happened, given what it looks like in PT and PM.
ReplyDeleteNone of the other Uralic reflexes mean "honey", either "sap" or "milk". And there are Uralic words for "honey" ("mäkɜ" and "mete", which also means the drink "mead"), and "honey bee" ("mekše"), which are borrowed from Indo-Euro. None of them have reflexes in Southern Samoyedic, though. Also sadly, there are no recorded words for "honey" in Southern Samoyedic.
But it stands to reason that P-S had a form of "sap" like Mari, with initial "w". In the Northern reflexes, it's gone, but their vowels are high and rounded, so it could've been deleted to dissimilate from the vowel. In the unattested Southern reflexes, it hardened into "b". All dialects deleted the final vowel, if it was there in P-S. Northern dialects tend to raise the vowel, Southern ones not so much, so it stayed low (at least to Yeniseian ears).
Alternatively, the P-S form began with a vowel, and the Southern dialects borrowed from Mari.
Both Northern and Southern dialects shifted the meaning to include a drinkable substance, including an alcoholic drink. So the referent was probably "mead" rather than "honey". Then during Altaic creolization, they inherited this word with a further shift to "honey", since evidently there was no word for "honey" in Southern Samoyedic. Or, it acquired the sense of "honey" in Southern Samoyedic, and Northern Samoyedic shifted it further to "mead" and then "alcoholic drink" and then "beverage".
The point is, the P-T and P-M words for "honey" are inherited from Uralic, via Southern Samoyedic, even if the Uralic words for "sap" are ultimately adoptions from a Crescentine or other substrate.
The Uralic origin for these "honey" words is superior to the guess that they come ultimately from Indo-Euro, whether directly from Indo-Iranian ("mádʰu") or Tocharian B ("mit"), or via loans from them, such as Chinese "mjit".
ReplyDeleteSemantically, the I-E words are closer to "bal" = "honey". But "sap" is not semantically far from "honey", and in Uralic it's already been shifted to refer to "milk", a drinkable substance of flora-and-fauna origin, so shifting "sap" to "honey" is even more credible, since honey is stickier and more viscous than milk.
The main problem is phonetic. Proto-Turkic bans initial nasals, so it would prefer to simply delete the "m" from the I-E word. That leaves a VC(V) shape, which is sufficient for a P-T word, as long as it's not just V, but every I-E "honey" word has a 2nd C.
Proto-Mongolic does not ban initial nasals, including "m", so it would simply adopt this with "m", not harden it to "b".
But both P-T and P-M lack "w", which they hardened to "b" at an early stage -- so early, that it already happened in the purely Southern Samoyedic parent, before creolization into Proto-Altaic. So a source of "b" beginning with "w" is superior to one beginning with "m".
None of the I-E words have the 2nd C as a liquid, except for Old Uyghur "mir" -- but that's obviously too late to be the source of Proto-Turkic! They all have an alveolar stop. A source with "l", not just any ol' liquid, is superior to one with "t" or "d".
And the I-E words originally had their 1st V as "e", which was raised to "i" in Tocharian B and its loan into Chinese "mjit". Even in Uralic, this was borrowed with "e". The only reflex with "a" is from Indo-Iranian, which lowered "e" and "o" into "a". So "bal" would have to specifically come from the Indo-Iranian branch.
However, the Indo-Iranians were driven away from the Altai region by 1100 BC, and never returned. They evidently did not leave their word for "honey" in any language of the region, based on the 1st vowel. So it was not there for P-T and P-M to later adopt. The only possibility is the very violent encounters between the Achaemenid Empire and the Massagetae, but I don't think those were favorable circumstances for borrowing an Iranian word for "honey". ^_^
Phonetically, "bal" derives from "wal", not "mad". Uralic origin, not Indo-Iranian or Indo-Euro.
Ethnologically, this is another surprising example of Samoyedic, Yeniseian, and their Altaic creoles fiercely resisting the cultural influence of the Indo-Europeans, who spread their words for "ox" and "honey" far and wide, including into East Asia -- but not to the successors of the Deer Stones culture, who would rather die than adopt even a single loanword from their foundational meta-ethnic nemesis...
And so, they kept Uralic words for "ox" and "honey" (via "sap") alive, when other branches of Uralic borrowed from Indo-Euro and even specifically Indo-Iranian, as though there were no taboo against it. Well, sure, those other Uralic groups were not on the receiving end of the ultimate showdown of the Aryan charioteers, which unfolded in the Altai-Sayan region during the Andronovo era.
Rather, the Altaic cultures went on the counter-offensive for millennia, spreading not only loanwords but entire languages westward, where Indo-Euro used to be common, culminating in the land of the oldest attested Indo-Euro branch, Anatolian, now speaking Turkic.
Sayan cultures will never forget the Aryan invasion, will never stop beating back any reincarnation of it, and will always take the chance when it arises to advance further into historical I-E lands, leaving their Eastern Steppe languages just as a reminder not to fuck with them ever again. ^_^
"Wealth" and "rich" in Altaic come from livestock term in Uralic. Let's start with a hilarious look into the Turkocentric mind, where Adam and Eve spoke Turkic, and everyone else on Earth ever since then has borrowed all their words from Turkic.
ReplyDeleteThe P-Turk word for "rich" is "bāy", and we can instantly tell it's unusual cuz it ends in "y", the only adjective in P-Turk that ends in this phoneme ("ȫgey" is more of a prefix, meaning "step-" when attaching to kin terms). Even for other parts of speech, there are about 5 nouns and 1 or 2 verb stems that end in "y", among the 1000 words listed in Wiktionary's P-T lemmas. So, there's no way that "y" is original, but we'll have to see what else it could be by comparing to other Altaic languages.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/b%C4%81y
First, we will look at the noun form of the adjective "rich", which is "wealth". Adjectives usually come from a noun -- and in this case, "wealth" is the most basic material thing there is. You can't refer to "rich" without alluding to a noun, the valuable material stuff that qualifies as "wealth".
"Wealth" in Mongolian is "bayalag", where "-(a)g" is a common noun ending, so the root is "bayal", with "l" as well as "y". In the Tungusic family, the Evenki word is "bai:l", similar to Mongolic (where "i" is like "y"), and "bajan" / "bayan" in Nanai and Manchu, like Turkic. Even within the Turkic family, the oldest surviving language, Chuvash, has "mul", with "l" and no "j / y" (although still beginning with a labial).
The various words for "rich" tend to have "y" alone, but Mongolian has "bayalag" here as well. Also, the P-T word ends in "y", whereas the Mongolic, Tungusic, and even Chuvash within Turkic, have "-an" after that -- "bayan" or similar. So they did not borrow those adjectives from Turkic, since none of them other than Chuvash have "-an".
In the oldest branch of Turkic, Oghur / Chuvash, "wealth" does not have a "y" but does have "l", and "rich" ends in "-an" -- unlike Common Turkic or the proposed P-T form.
So, these are not borrowed from Turkic. Not even Chuvash is derived from P-T.
Rather, they must all come from a shared ancestor, but due to some strange nature of the final consonant or two consonants, it was resolved differently in the descendants.
Naturally, this will be a Uralic word, and since the Altaic words begin with "b", we will find it among Uralic words beginning with "w". It should have something like "l" and something like "y" after the main vowel, and the main vowel should be low. Semantically, it should be a natural source of material wealth for the nomadic pastoralist cultures who spoke Yeniseian, Samoyedic, and their creoles, the Altaic trio.
This time the Uralic word is found in Finno-Ugric, but not Samoyedic. I doubt it used to exist in Samoyedic but died out in every descendant. But not to worry -- this is a case of it coming from some other nearby Uralic language, likely Ugric, which is also eastern like Samoyedic. In fact, Eastern Khanty and Yeniseian are neighbors, and in the northern Yeniseian languages like Ket, they're practically right on top of Eastern Khanty speakers.
ReplyDeleteI think the Yeniseians were the ones to bring this word into Altaic, during creolization. It's still of Uralic origin, but it didn't come via Samoyedic as usual. I don't see it in the list of Proto-Yeniseian words, so they didn't borrow it into Yeniseian first, and then import it to Altaic. I already showed that Yeniseian loaned its own horse-word into Ugric, so they must have borrowed a word from Ugric in exchange -- but only when they were creolizing with Samoyedic speakers into Altaic.
Or perhaps Ugric speakers formed a minority in the Altaic creolization process, and it wasn't only Samoyedic speakers who represented pure Uralic. IDK, it's not important exactly who brought it into the creole, just that it is Uralic in origin.
In Proto-Finno-Ugric, "wälɜ" (perhaps "wäδɜ") refers to a large livestock animal -- cattle, horse, and reindeer are all attested. Not a wild game animal, but a unit of wealth in a pastoralist society, where the size of the herd is the main factor determining your wealth.
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1129
In Khanty, 2 of the 3 dialects have "l" with a "y"-like feature -- followed by "i" or palatalized "l". One dialect of Mari also has palatalized "l". This variation accounts for the variation between "y" or "l" or sometimes both, in the Altaic descendants. The initial "w" was hardened to "b" as usual for Southern Samoyedic, and the low vowel was retained (as "a").
I speculate that P-Turk reflects the palatalized "l" being split into 2 separate phonemes, "ly", and since coda clusters are not allowed, one had to go. They chose to delete the one further from the word-boundary, to preserve the boundary, leaving the very unusual "y" at the end, deleting the "l" (which is a much better final consonant), and lengthened the vowel to compensate.
So, now we see how that highly unusual "y" got to be at the end of a word -- it did not descend from a single phoneme, but as part of a 2-phoneme sequence that was also not original, since "ly" is even WORSE word-finally. Only due to separating the palatalized "l" into "ly", did this sequence end up word-finally, and by preserving the word boundary consonant, it ended up with the nearly impossible word-final "y".
Only the Uralic skeleton unlocked this dizzying riddle of Turkic, and Altaic in general.
But wait, there's more! P-Turk inherited other reflexes of this Uralic livestock term, though not having to do with "wealth". And these words do have "l", but not "y", so they look like the Mongolic and Tungusic words like that, and unlike "bāy".
ReplyDeleteFirst, notice that in Sami and Mordvinic, their words specifically refer to a young animal...
In Common Turkic, "baltïr" = "calf", i.e. a young cow. Here, "bal" is derived from the Uralic livestock term. And "tïr" is a suffix that is a fossilized form of a verb for "stand", and refers to things being "true" or "real" or something like that. Semantically, this word means "a REAL calf", not a figurative calf. That is, it's bovine, not human. We'll see the connection in a bit.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/balt%C3%AFr
Notice the absence of "y"? Maybe it used to be there, in the sequence "lyt", and the "y" was deleted in order to make a phonotactically good syllable transition, "lt" rather than "yt". Or for this word, they never treated the final consonant of the Uralic word as palatalized, just plain "l".
Now for some literal and figurative uses of "young animal" from the same Uralic source. There's "bāla", which means "young animal", but also "child", "wife's younger sister", and "younger relative". This is the same semantic development as "kid" in English, which originally and literally referred to a young goat, a goatling. But then it was extended to refer to a child, "kid", and even as a modifier for kin terms, like "kid sister", meaning a younger relative.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/b%C4%81la
This clearly comes from the same Uralic source, and the vowel is now long again, in the presence of only 1 consonant after it, just like "bāy" but unlike "baltïr". So this time, they deleted the "y" rather than the "l" of the sequence "ly", stemming from palatalized "l" in Uralic.
Related is "bāldïŕ", formed from "bāla + dïŕ", which is only used figuratively, for "man's wife's younger sister" or "younger relative", not "young animal".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/b%C4%81ld%C3%AF%C5%95
IDK what the suffix "dïŕ" means, but I assume it's playful and signals that this is a figurative, not literal, sense of the root. Similar to the English suffix "-o" in "kiddo", which cannot refer to an animal, but only a human child, even though the root referred to a goatling. This suffix also shows up on "boy-o".
Here we have long "ā" followed by 2 consonants, but the vowel was lengthened during the formation of "bāla", so that by the time the suffix "dïŕ" is attached and the intervening vowel deleted, it's too late to re-shorten the 1st vowel.
So, P-T was not only aware of the Uralic root, it had several related words derived from it, that did not refer to "wealth", but "young animal" or by extension "young person". These forms look much closer to the Mongolic and Tungusic forms with "l", and to the Uralic source of them all. But it is cognate with the P-T word for "rich", whose "l" was deleted and whose very odd word-final "y" was preserved, as explained.
No, Siberian Adam and Eve did not speak Turkic, and the related languages did not just borrow everything from Turkic. Especially not Samoyedic and Yeniseian, which are older than Turkic by at least 1000 years.
ReplyDeleteRather, Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic are the creole offspring of the true Adam and Eve of the Eastern Steppe -- Yeniseian and Uralic / Samoyedic. It is an affront to filial piety to suggest Turkic as a donor into Samoyedic, and pathetic sibling rivalry to claim Mongolic and Tungusic borrowed everything from Turkic.
The proper balance can only be restored by the judgment of this cliff-dwelling sage in the ruins of the blogosphere... ^_^
P-Turkic word for "moon" comes from Samoyedic word for "full moon", itself borrowed from Tocharian. Wow!
ReplyDeleteOne of the other very few P-T words ending in "y" is "āy" = "moon, month". No cognates in Mongolic or Tungusic this time.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/%C4%81y
What the hell??? I just couldn't let this riddle remain unlocked, I just HAD to drop everything and head down this secret passage-way. Luckily it only took 30 minutes -- when guided by the true vision that I am possessed by. No one else has even wandered remotely near this solution.
OK, remember how I said that a difficult consonant like palatalized "l" could have its rich set of features decomposed into 2 separate phonemes, placed in a sequence? Same thing here -- the final consonant was not originally "y" but a palatalized consonant, which was deleted since it was not word-final, and P-T wanted to preserve the consonant at the word boundary when simplifying illegal word-final clusters. After that 1st member of the sequence was deleted, the preceding vowel was lengthened to compensate.
Also notice the lack of a consonant at the beginning -- it must have had one, but it was among the banned ones for initial position -- "p", any liquid, any nasal (the ban on "d" and "g" came later).
The original vowel should be low.
In this case, it comes from a Samoyedic word meaning "full moon", whose only surviving reflexes are in the Northern dialects, but whose P-S reconstruction based on them, is "män[ä/i]wjə", where "-w" and "-jə" are derivational suffixes, and "män[ä/i]" is the root.
See the discussion in Ch. 9 of Warries (2025), "Tocharian and Samoyed: On the question of Uralic substrate influence in Tocharian". That reviews the case for this P-S word being a loan from Tocharian.
I don't really care about that, for the present purpose of where the P-T word for "moon" comes from, cuz between 500 BC to 500 AD, when the Altaic creoles are forming, Tocharian has split up into at least A and B, and they've hidden themselves way down in the Tarim Basin. It would be difficult for P-T speakers to contact them, let alone extensively, and to borrow the word for "moon" of all things, as tourists to the Tarim Basin.
Incidentally, though, the Tocharian A word for "moon" is precisely what we're looking for, "mañ" (from P-IE "mḗh₁n̥s"). Despite the perfect phonetic and semantic match, I doubt it on the grounds of geographic proximity and timing. Possible, but best not to rely on that. It was the more eastern of the 2 Tocharian languages, though. Also, it makes the model more complex than it needs to be, if we can derive it from Samoyedic, which is a guaranteed major component of the model of where P-T comes from -- whereas we can assume no Tocharian, unless all else fails.
The P-S "moon" word already has 2 out of 3 identical phonemes with Toch A, and the manner of the 3rd is the same, nasal. All we need to do is get it to be a palatalized nasal, or "n" followed by "j" (which removes the step of breaking up palatalized "n" into the sequence "ny"). That means the productive adjective / noun suffix "-jə" must be reflected in the Southern word.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of how the 2nd vowel was realized, it could have been re-analyzed especially under Yeniseian influence, to not have too many open syllables, and adhering to Uralic word shape CVCCV. This is easier if the vowel was "iw" -> "ü", followed by "j", which is similar to high-front vowels, that one had to go for dissimilation. Uralic prefers a medial consonant sequence, not medial CVC sequence, so the vowel went.
That would leave "mänjə", whose reduced final vowel was deleted, as is typical. As usual under Yeniseian influence, both low vowels become "a". That leaves "manj", possibly fusing the cluster to "mañ" if no cluster was allowed. QED.
Again, the Southern dialects left no surviving examples of the P-S reconstruction -- but they did leave a trace in Pre-Proto-Turkic, where it had its initial nasal deleted, final "ñ" separated into "ny" (or it was already that way in Southern Samoyedic), non-edge member of the illegal cluster deleted, with compensatory lengthening on the preceding vowel, yielding "āy".
Given the flood of inherited words from Samoyedic into P-T, it's simplest to assume this was inherited as well, even though Toch A provides a perfect match as well. That direct loan from Tocharian is weaker than it seems, compared to getting it via Samoyedic's loan from Tocharian. The timing, the geography, the duration of contact, and the fact that only Toch A provides the perfect match, while Toch B "meñe" requires deletion of its final vowel and lowering its main vowel. There are too many improbable assumptions to the direct loan from Tocharian into P-T, and we already know it was loaned into P-S, whose Southern reflex could easily result in "manj" during the creolization stage.
One of the strangest and yet most basic words in all of Turkic -- and only the Uralic skeleton key could unlock its secrets! ^_^
One note on Yeniseian influence during creolization -- P-Y has 4 nasal phonemes, like NE Asia, which loves its nasals. But it lacks the palatal nasal, unlike the Uralo-Siberian languages; its 4th one is a labialized velar nasal, which does not show up in the Uralo-Siberian ones, but does in Na-Dene.
ReplyDeleteProto-Turkic is reconstructed with a palatal nasal, but like the palatal liquids, it never surfaces that way in the descendants, splitting into "n" or "m" in Oghur vs. "y" in Common Turkic (for the most part). This reflects the difficulty of Yeniseian speakers trying to acquire a Uralic language, which has palatal nasals. They could not be accomodated, and the creole speakers had to choose which of the two features they wanted to keep as primary -- nasal or palatal.
So in yet another way, Altaic looks like Samoyedic spoken with a Yeniseian accent.
Ooooh, another thing! This is an example of an indirect Indo-Euro loan into Proto-Turkic -- does that contradict what I said about the successors of the Deer Stones culture being the bulwark against Indo-Euro invasion?
Not in this case, since it was from Tocharian, who, as Peyrot showed, were former Samoyedic speakers who switched to the I-E language of some influential group of Western Steppe migrants. The Western Steppe culture that they interacted with, was not an apocalyptic charioteer cult, like the later Indo-Iranians were. And their fusion culture was still largely Eastern, not Western -- Tocharian clothing was like Easterners', not Westerners, and they adopted Buddhism, not Christianity. Just like the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic speakers -- Buddhism, not Christianity.
So if I-E influence came via the Tocharians, it's tolerated. Just nothing that smacks of the Indo-Iranians. BTW, it wasn't an I-I variant of "moon" that showed up in Pre-PT, cuz it was "maHas", where the syllabic "n" of P-IE vocalized into "a", so there was no potential for a palatalized nasal there. And there's no "y"-like consonant or even vowel toward the end of the I-I word. They really left nothing behind in the Altai after their Andronovo swan song / suicide by mounted cop.
Another reason to doubt the P-T moon word is direct from Tocharian instead of Samoyedic, is the absence of a cognate in Mongolic and Tungusic -- who are much closer to the Tarim Basin, as they're on the eastern side of the Sayan Mountains. Chinese borrowed from Tocharian, and it's also east of the Sayan Mountains.
ReplyDeleteI think if any of the 3 Altaic groups would borrow directly from Tocharian, it would be Mongolic, based on geography. Not Turkic. And yet neither did, at least AFAICT. The basic word for "moon" is "sara" in Mongolic and "biaga" in Tungusic -- however, there may be more obscure terms, like the "full moon" word in Samoyedic, which is not its basic word for moon (that is "kïj", of native Uralic origin).
One final quickie. Turkic "sable" is from P-Samoyedic. The Turkocentric delusion continues! Look at this ridiculousness, which claims Turkic loaned it into P-S.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/ki
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/k%C4%AB%C4%BA
Proto-Samoyedic is the oldest proto stage of the Uralic family, which has spanned from Lake Baikal to Scandinavia, the Volga, and even the northern Black Sea shores (Scythians) by the 1st millennium BC. Turkic wasn't spoken until the late part of that millennium, or the 1st millennium AD. So, this is another case of Turkocentrics thinking Adam and Eve spoke Turkic, rather than the true parents of Siberia being Uralic and Yeniseian.
Also, the word is not attested in Oghur, except for a borrowing from a Common Turkic source. Given the P-T reconstruction "kīĺ", this would be "kil" in Oghur, and show up as "kil" in P-S, maybe with a dummy vowel at the end.
Instead, in P-S it's "ki" -- in no way a loan from Turkic.
Rather, the expected inversion of this Turkocentric craziness -- Kamassian, in the south, has a variant with medial "l" followed by palatal vowel "e / i", although their original 1st C has been palatalized to "s / š" by the following palatal vowel. Still, the Kamassian reconstruction is "kilä", with "k".
Turkic could only loan it to Kamassian, not P-S. So instead, P-S had this word before Turkic even existed, and the distinctive Kamassian variant, with medial "l" followed by palatal vowel, was inherited into the creole of P-T, as "kīĺ". There's no reason for P-T to tack on "ĺ", of all consonants, if they heard the non-Kamassian variants. Too much of a coincidence that it matches "le/i" from the suffix in Kamassian.
This Kamassian word was inherited into Turkic so late that it doesn't appear as expected in Chuvash, which would have "l". Instead, it only entered Turkic after Oghur split, post-PT, and it entered the Common Turkic side, from which it was borrowed into Chuvash with "š" instead of "l".
Why do the most insanely crazy, clever-silly, contrarian retards get into historical linguistics? Iranians at the Prut River with multiple "o"s and "l"s in their names (including initially), Turkic speakers in 10,000 BC loaning words into the oldest branch of Uralic... it's absolutely NUTS. Something attracts these types to ancient cultural history, but I will expunge them all, single-handedly if I have to...
Actually, one more final note on genetics, and their non-mapping to culture, still on the topic of Indo-Euros and such. When you hear about Proto-Indo-Iranians or Indo-Iranians, lasting through the Andronovo culture, they are not related very much to the people of the land we call Iran.
ReplyDeleteThe I-I's had high Yamnaya-like ancestry, vs. only 10-20% of the people inside Iran. It gets up to 30% for Iranian speakers of Khorasan, closer to the Steppe, but even that's less than the 45-50% that it is in Scandinavia -- including the highest of all, at 50% -- in FINLAND, which has never spoken Indo-Euro languages.
The people of Iran, from now back to thousands of years ago, have been basically the same genetically. Whoever the Elamites were, they're the same today, thousands of years later -- with 10% Yamnaya DNA, BFD. That's about what Sicily has, and no one thinks Sicilians are recent arrivals from the Western Steppe. Well, neither are the people of Iran or Afghanistan, or India.
And yet, the people of Iran and Afghanistan and India have been speaking Indo-Euro languages, and practicing Indo-Euro rituals like jumping over fire for good luck on the springtime renewal holiday, playing egg-tapping games on that same holiday, and so on and so forth.
Genetic variants did not spread the cultural variants.
Conversely, the most Yamnaya-like people on Earth are Finns, who not only have never spoken Indo-Euro in their entire existence, they didn't adopt those other Indo-Euro practices. Their mythology is still very Uralic, not Indo-Euro.
On the topic of Crescentine cultures, guess who has the highest Yamnaya DNA in Italy? Etruscans! Around 30%, vs. 10% in the deep south or Sicily. Like the Finns, the Etruscans never spoke an Indo-Euro language, nor practice Indo-Euro culture broadly, not until the expansion of the Roman Empire, when they decided to join the culture of the liberators from their shared Celtic meta-ethnic nemesis. But Etruscans had all that Yamnaya DNA way before they switched to Latin in 300 BC or whenever. They had more Yamnaya DNA than their southern neighbors who had been speaking Italic and Hellenic languages for over a millennium.
Given the high degree of DNA influx, yet zero cultural conversion to Indo-Euro, just as in Scandinavia, I conclude that the Yamnaya types who entered Northern Italy and blended into the existing non-IE culture, were also refugees from the Western Steppe, who'd been driven out of their home turf by Eastern raiders, as always. Possibly it was during the same catastrophe that sent Yamnaya types fleeing into NE, where they spawned the Corded Ware culture, but some others among them headed south, over the safe barrier of the Alps, where the horse-riding archers of the East could no longer harass them.
Maybe it was a more recent catastrophe than that, like the domino effect that Herodotus describes as ultimately sending the Scythians into the Black Sea area, where they displaced the local Cimmerians. Maybe that's who crossed the Alps and blended into the Etruscans, IDK exactly who, but definitely one of those refugee situations, where they left no cultural trace behind, since they were not successful and influential role models, but were still welcomed into the genepool by marriage.
Genes do not store culture, that is pure cope from people whose culture is collapsing during imperial collapse, and want to hope that the recipe for greatness is still there, waiting to express itself. No, it's not -- it's entirely historically contingent, socially constructed, and culturally transmitted. When your empire is on the rise, people are cooperative and you can use that for great things. When it's run its course, cooperation disintegrates, and you're destined for shithole status, delapidation, ruin, and outright self-destruction and iconoclasm of what you *did* manage to create when you were on top.
Time to WAKE UP for God's sake.
So it's like how blacks are genetically mostly African but culturally significantly closer to Europe than Africa.
DeleteRight, the descendants of African slaves in America are culturally American, not African. They speak English only -- specifically, American English -- and don't even know which languages their ancestors spoke, if they wanted to revive them.
ReplyDeleteThey dress exactly like Americans, not traditional African clothing of any kind.
They're the same religion as Americans, whether you consider that Christianity, Protestantism, American-style evangelism, Pentecostal spirit possession, or whatever else. They don't practice African folk religions. There may be some remnants of African folk religions, but mostly they're gone.
Same with music and dance. Ragtime, jazz, R&B, and rap are entirely American creations, with both European and African descendants contributing to them, enjoying them, and dancing to them. The fox-trot was not imported from some Ghana folk dance, it's native to America.
Same with food -- they eat the same things we do, even things they consider super-African-American like fried chicken, which is actually Scottish in origin. They eat pizza, another American creation, snack on popcorn at the movie theater (another American creation), hamburgers (ditto), and so on and so forth.
Their birth, marriage, and burial rituals are the same as Euro-Americans, not holdovers from any part of Africa. Going to a hospital to give birth rather than in the home. Marital bond signaled by a ring, and which specific finger the ring goes on. Burying in the ground, in a coffin, six feet under, when that was the all-American norm. Maybe cremating today, when that's becoming more normal. But, no holdover of African burial customs.
Specific things, names, memories, etc. of American history and culture. Whether they identify with them or not, value them or not -- at least they know what's being referred to. Like "Indians and Pilgrims", or "the Sixties", or "FDR", or "Steve Urkel", or whatever else.
Like I've said before, African-Americans are quickly becoming the only people I feel any instant cultural connection with when I go out in public anymore. Long-time Euro-Americans are still there, but they're dwindling, and a large share of them are consciously trying to de-Americanize themselves, shit on American culture, or destroy and erase it, and shame anyone who still enjoys being American culturally. On both sides of the libtard and conservatard aisle.
ReplyDeleteBlack people don't do that.
New ethnic groups may not be deliberately shitting on American culture, but they also don't have the connections to it either. So it's like speaking to someone who doesn't understand my language. They're part of an ethnic enclave, and there are so many different enclaves that you can't even use a single cultural translator to interact with them.
With black people, no translator is needed, and no self-effacing self-hating bullshit is necessary to just connect with your fellow Americans. You can just whistle or sing along to Michael Jackson when it's on the speaker system in Kroger, and they'll get it, and not wonder what your problem is. It could be Taylor Swift, too, not just a black artist. Black people still recognize Taylor Swift, even if she's not on all their playlists. The point is, they still know what that music is, and aren't confused when someone is singing or whistling along to it.
Actual foreigners don't even know what I'm whistling along to, and that makes it alienating. We're not sharing an understanding, and that prevents collective effervescence from taking place. They don't even have to be hostile or destructive -- merely being ignorant of it, cuz it's not their culture. And that makes all these zillions of enclaves fold in on themselves, where they *can* experience collective effervescence, in their Arabic-language mosque -- not the Urdu-language mosque or the Somali-language mosque.
It's so fragmented out there, and being around black people is a welcome reprieve from the fragmentation. You actually feel part of a larger cohesive whole.
They may be part of a different sub-culture within American culture, but they're still our brother from another mother. ^_^
And speaking of kin, African-Americans have zero relatives outside of America, they don't even know where to track them down if they wanted to. They spend zero time outside of America, and they will never "go back to where they came from". Where? They don't know, they don't speak the language, have any of the customs, etc. They wouldn't fit in at all, so they're here to stay. They're rooted here, by severing the roots of where they came from.
ReplyDeleteUnlike new ethnic groups that have extensive family contacts outside America, frequently visit them, have a place to eject to when the shit hits the fan, etc. They're not rooted to this country at all. Now that collapse is actively under way, more of them will start abandoning ship, and no replacements will come from their homeland -- who wants to board a sinking ship?
Just like the disappearance of non-Italians in Italy when the Roman Empire collapsed. Most went back to Greece or Syria. No new Syrians wanted to join a collapsing anarchic shithole. And the handful who remained had no local deep roots to sustain them through the anarchic deprivation, so their lineages died out. Very few even managed to marry into the locals, since you generally don't marry across ethnic lines all of a sudden.
The same will be true in America over the next few centuries. I wish it were within my lifetime, but that's wishful thinking. Give it a few centuries, America will be composed of only Americans again -- you just won't be here to enjoy it.
This is no more genetic for us / me than it is for them. I don't feel any belonging when I'm around any ol' random group of Africans, like recent immigrants. Zero connection whatsoever. Genes do not have microscopic magnets that attract you to others like yourself. I can tell when white people are foreigners, too, and I feel zero connection to them.
ReplyDeleteJust cuz we're white? LOL. If racial solidarity were a real phenomenon, Europe would not have been the most collectively violent place on planet Earth for millennia.
"Hi there, how do you do, fellow white person?"
*gets stabbed by a Celt in Etruria*
I don't think so.
Franks, Saxons, Danes -- depending on what language they spoke, what religion they worshiped, what their subsistence mode was, all these vaguely Germanic cultures were at each other's throats. They couldn't even do German solidarity -- Germany and Austria were separate empires, and the latter included all sorts of non-Germanic cultures like Slavs.
Cultural belonging, affinity, etc., is historically contingent, socially constructed, and culturally transmitted. It's not even enough to speak the same language. It's all the other markers of cultural membership, in the here-and-now.
"Um, ACKSHUALLY, although we may presently stand across a cultural divide, circa 3000 BC all of our ancestors spoke Proto-Indo-European in one great big happy family, which we should all RETVRN to."
No we didn't, dork. Italians' ancestors spoke Etruscan in 3000 BC, Greeks' ancestors spoke a related language to Etruscan (Pre-Greek), Iberians' ancestors spoke a Basque-like language, and we don't even know what the Brits' ancestors spoke, but it wasn't Indo-Euro.
There's just so much of this coping bullshit going on, and it goes nowhere anyway -- just give it a rest, already.
Turkic word for "100" inherited from Samoyedic, originally meaning "head" in Uralic and Uralo-Siberian, and extended to refer to the size of a herd, thus "a large number".
ReplyDeleteI already covered the logic of this when I discovered that the various Medireannean words for "a large number" beginning with "m", then a high-front vowel, then a liquid (like Latin "mille" and Greek "myrios"), were from Cushitic (also loaned into other branches of Saharo-Arabian, like Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic). This derived from the Cushitic word for "head" -> livestock animal -> herd of such animals -> size of that herd -> bigass number.
In English, we do a "head count" to count the size of a group of people, and count livestock herds with the counter-word "head". But we don't use "head" as an abstract numeral that can quantify any ol' noun -- only livestock.
This is one reason why number-words are so often borrowed, BTW -- they allow you to divorce the semantic origins of the numeral, from the pure number itself. If you want to count anything, then it's acting like a determiner, and you can't have connotations going on in your head when you're using numbers abstractly.
You don't want to hear the word "little" or "pointer" or "hand", when you're use a number-word like "five", "one", "four", etc.
So, over history, each language group coined its own set of numerals, but they still made some kind of sense in their own languages -- they couldn't totally shed their semantic roots. When they encountered other language families, they decided to do a little trading -- we'll take your number-words, since we won't understand their semantic roots, and they'll sound like pure numbers to us. And you take ours, whose semantic roots you won't understand, so they'll sound like pure numbers to you. Deal? Great!
Also, as mentioned with Cushitic, pastoralists are more likely to coin order-of-magnitude words, since they have large numbers of things to count -- their herds, which can vary by orders of magnitude. Agriculturalists count mass nouns, like amount of processed wheat, usually by its weight or volume, not counting up the individual grains one by one.
However, small-time gardeners count individual plants for some species, like root vegetables. A recipe calls for "3 turnips", not "one pound of turnips". Only if it's processed into a mass noun, like "one cup of tomato paste". Y'know, in English we also refer to root vegetables using the counter-word "head" -- a head of lettuce / cauliflower / cabbage / etc.
Keep that in the back of your mind, while we get going on this Siberian number-word journey!
It's already known that the words for "100" are the same in both Proto-Turkic and Proto-Samoyedic, "yǖŕ" and "jür".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/y%C7%96%C5%95
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/j%C3%BCr
The only question is, who gave it to who? Based on chronology, it must be P-S -> P-T, since it's in the proto-stage of Samoyedic, not just one late descendant, and Samoyedic is the oldest branch of Uralic, which is itself a very old family. P-T simply did not exist that far back, it's a young family that is closely related to Mongolic and Tungusic, which are also young families, not interacting with much older families' proto-stages like Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Yeniseian or Proto-Na-Dene, Proto-Sino-Tibetan, or Proto-Uralic.
The geography doesn't help, since they were clearly near each other, and proves that the two words are related, but not which direction they traveled.
Phonetic considerations don't answer much either. The proto-forms are virtually identical, and both sides show a split in the reflexes, with some keeping "y" (Common Turkic, Tundra Nenets), and others affricating or assibilating it into "č", "ś", or "ʒ́" (Oghur Turkic, Sayan Samoyedic).
So that leaves semantic considerations -- which family can supply the semantic basis for the 100-word? -- and external considerations, like is that semantic basis of broader range in its larger family.
Both of these point to P-S being the originator, and P-T inheriting it during creolization.
There are no words like "yur" in P-T to derive the word for "100". Alter the vowel to any of the 4 high vowels, nothing is plausible. No word begins with "yur" or "yir", "yïr" = "song", and "yüŕük" = "ring". Allowing long vowels only turns up "yūrt" = "camp-site, tent" -- which is ALSO Samoyedic and Uralic, but we'll get to that one later today.
That vowel is back, anyway, not front like the 100-word in either language. And even if it were to serve as the basis for "yǖŕ", the final "t" would have to be removed, when you'd expect a "large number" word to add on suffixes to indicate plural, collective, large size, etc.
With no leads in Turkic, we whip out the Uralic skeleton key to unlock yet another mystery of ancient Siberia...
Samoyedic has since lost the cognate word that's the basis for "100", but it survives in other Uralic branches. In Finno-Volga-land, it's "jure".
ReplyDeletehttps://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1254
Its reflex in Proto-Permic means "head", and has since been extended to also refer to "ear of grain plant" and "small haystack", both of which are counted by farmers, not measured as mass nouns.
In the other F-V branches, it has lost the original meaning of head, and retained the narrowed senses of "main part of a plant", now referring to "root".
So, here we have a word originally meaning "head" and used to count the items produced by the subsistence mode -- an ear of a corn, a small haystack.
That allows other branches of Uralic to have a word for "head", which as we've seen in English and Cushitic, can be used to count livestock. In English, "head" was first used to count livestock, and only many centuries later, to count certain kinds of vegetables like cabbage and lettuce. Likely the same happened in Uralic, and you can see why -- livestock animals have a literal head, to refer to them by, whereas a root vegetable has a kind-of body with a kind-of head, and it requires more imagination and indulgence in poetic license to count cabbage using "head".
Therefore, the earliest meaning of this Uralic word was "head". It retained this meaning in Permic, along with some subsistence-related counting words. It lost the original meaning in Samoyedic, but retained the subsistence-related counting word -- showing that it was probably already used as a counting-word for livestock back in P-U, likely originating from the reindeer herders among them.
So, Uralic can supply the semantic basis for the P-S word for "100", originally meaning "head" and then becoming a counter-word for livestock, then the size of a large herd, specified as "100" when this numeral was needed.
Phonetically, the reflexes outside Scandinavia show the typical deletion of the vowel in the Proto-Uralic dummy suffix "-ra", ending in just "-r". We'll get to this suffix in a bit.
So phonetically, that's a good match, too -- "jur", only needing to front the vowel, to give the Samoyedic word for "100". Although not a regular process for an agglutinative language, perhaps this happened by vowel alternation. Or, it was irregularly inherited from P-U as "jür" in P-S, which is not unusual, since there are lots of irregular vowel correspondences between Samoyedic and the other branches.
In P-S, it retained the P-U sense of "head" and/or "counting word for livestock". No other branch of Uralic uses it as a numeral, let alone "100" instead of some other large number, so that was an innovation of Samoyedic. This shows that only Samoyedic is the plausible source of the Turkic numeral, not a vague Uralic source.
Looking further into the Uralo-Siberian group, there's a Proto-Yukaghir word that is reconstructed as "jo:" and among its meanings are literal head-words -- "head", "forehead", "brain", "hair", "skull", and "pillow".
ReplyDeleteSee entry 689 here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Yukaghir_reconstructions
This Yukaghir word is of shape CV, and the similar word in Pre-Proto-Uralic was likely also CV. Lots of words in P-U show dummy suffixes -- semantically vacuous, not morphologically predictable (like being a case ending, or plural number, or gender marker, etc.). They are strictly used as phonetic filler material, as Uralic moved from monosyllabic roots to disyllabic roots.
What should happen to the really old roots, which were monosyllables? Well, fill them out with semantically meaningless syllables, so the updated version has a disyllabic shape.
One of the most common of these dummy suffixes is "-rɜ", whose vowel is so unimportant and often deleted, that it cannot be reconstructed most of the time. For ease of reading, I'll label it "-ra".
So, I assume that in Pre-PU, there was a word like "jo" from Proto-Yukaghir, also meaning "head". During the transition to disyllabic word shape, this needed a dummy suffix, and got "-ra", yielding something like "jora".
Judging from the attested forms in Uralic, the Pre-PU form was probably not "jo" but "ju", and either cognate with the P-Y word due to sharing at least one parent (possibly being half-sibling creoles), or a deeper uni-lineal inheritance, or was a regional wanderwort.
With the dummy suffix, in P-U it became "jura", reduced to the muddled "jurɜ" in the descendants, some of their proto-stages already deleting the final reduced vowel, as just "jur" -- or irregularly in P-S, as "jür".
This further bolsters the semantic and phonetic grounds for the Samoyedic word for "100" being the original counting word, ultimately based on a broad and old word for "head". Turkic inherited it during creolization between Samoyedic and Yeniseian.
Important sidebar on the sounds used in dummy suffixes. It strikes me that Uralic used a dummy suffix "rV", since that's also the same one that Japonic used, as it transitioned from monosyllabic roots to disyllabic. There's "ra", "ri", "ru" (obligatory verb ending), "re", and "ro". They mean nothing in themselves, they're just used as phonetic filler material, on very old monosyllabic roots.
ReplyDeleteE.g., the original P-J first-person pronouns are "o" (singular) and "wa" (plural). They both added "-re", to yield the familar "ore" and "ware", which are disyllabic but mean the exact same thing as the old monosyllabic forms did. Same with "ko", the old pronoun meaning "this", which took the same filler suffix, "-re", yielding "kore" and still meaning the same thing.
No, I don't think Uralic and Japonic are related families -- Uralic is its own, or related to Yukaghir and maybe Eskaleut. And Japonic is part of Wa-Dene-Yeniseian.
But what both families share is a phonotactic ban on "r" at the beginning of words. I now think this is a stronger ban on "r" at the beginning of "meaningful morphemes", including standalone words, but also bound morphemes like suffixes that have some kind of semantic content -- number, gender, case, changing the part of speech, intensity, familiarity, etc.
What's going on here? Well, it's the idea of a lexicon -- a mental list of pairs between sounds and meanings. The ban on "r" applies to everything in the lexicon -- and to be included in the lexicon, it must have a meaning, otherwise it's not a pair between sound and meaning.
These dummy suffixes have zero semantic content, so they don't go in the lexicon. I don't even think they're mentally listed in a separate database, like "semantically empty, phonetic filler material, in case you need to fill out a monosyllable". That was only necessary during a certain period of the language's history, so there's no need to keep it in mind for contemporary speakers.
Its effects have all become lexicalized by now, so there's no need to run the process anew -- there are no remaining monosyllables to fill out. All the ones that were filled-out in the past, have attained lexical status, and don't need to be interpreted as morphologically complex anymore. So there's not even a list of any kind, where these entries show that they begin with "r". That is, "r" is banned for any kind of morpheme listed in the speaker's mind.
Why was "r" chosen for the filler suffix? Cuz then you can tell it's not a new word, since words can't start with "r". And cuz you can tell it's not a suffix you have to look up during lexical semantics, since it begins with "r", and no morpheme in your mental lists of morphemes of any kind, can begin with "r".
Thus, you hear it as part of the same monosyllabic word you've already started to parse, and you don't need to bother with its meaning, so it just means what the old monosyllable meant, now with an extra "ra" or "re" or whatever at the end, giving it 2 syllables.
This eases the transition from monosyllabic to disyllabic roots -- the extra material that has been added onto the familiar monosyllabic roots, cannot possibly alter the meaning of the familiar monosyllable, since the filler begins with a sound that cannot begin any item listed in your mind. There's nothing further to mentally look up. It's just a phonetic surprise --
"Oh, I thought that word was a monosyllable... but that extra "re" at the end can't possibly mean anything, so I suppose we're just pronouncing it differently now. Y'know, the filler does make the whole word sound a little better, like these disyllabic words that are becoming so popular these days..."
Pretty ingenious solution to come up with on-the-fly, and independently in two separate families! Nature always finds a way... ^_^
To be exact, the cause of the irregular P-S reflex "jürɜ" from P-U "jurɜ", is the adjacent palatal "j", which pulled the vowel forward to front position.
ReplyDeleteAikio (2002), "New and Old Samoyed Etymologies" offers this same reason for the same irregular vowel shift, from the same environment, in the case of a different word, P-U "juri" leading to P-S "jürə", for a word we'll see as the source of Turkic "yurt", which means "to lose one's way" and secondarily "to forget".
BTW, all other Uralic languages borrowed their word for "100" from some Indo-Iranian-ish language, as they ventured west across Eurasia, and the I-I's ventured east. Something like "śëta".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Uralic/%C5%9B%C3%ABta
But, as I keep emphasizing, Samoyedic speakers would rather die than borrow even a single word from the language of their meta-ethnic nemesis, the apocalyptic charioteer cult of the Andronovo. They held onto the original Uralic word for "100", and that anti-Indo-Euro tendency continued during the Samoyedic-Yeniseian creolization process that resulted in the Altaic languages.
"The only good Indo-Iranian word is an UN-borrowed one," to the ears of the Samoyedic people. ^_^
Now for the Uralic origin of Turkic "yūrt", originally referring to the tent-like dwellings of nomads, which they could pack up, haul around, and set up again, as a necessary part of their nomadic subsistence mode.
ReplyDeleteThey did not build permanent settlements, whether fortified or not, like the Indo-Iranians. They did not perform transhumance pastoralism, where the herders drive their herds through a predictable, repeating closed circuit, from valleys in the winter to hills and mountains during the summer. That allows for a permanent home base as well, which you periodically return to. They simply wandered wherever there was pasture for their livestock. Or if they were engaged in raiding, they wandered in any ol' direction in search of settlements to raid. That requires dwellings that are as mobile as the horses and the people riding on them -- like tents.
We already examined the P-T lexicon for any plausible native origin for "100", finding nothing. But that also applies to "yūrt", which can only permit the same vowel alternations as "yǖŕ".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/y%C5%ABrt
It's also highly unusual by ending in a consonant cluster, which are mostly banned in P-T, but sometimes allowed if the 2nd phoneme is "t".
I already showed the Samoyedic origin of another such P-T word, "ānt" = "oath" and cognate with "anda" = "blood-brother, friend, companion" in P-Mongolic and P-Tungusic. These all are inherited from P-S "aŋtə" = "blade", alluding to the blood-letting and blood-drinking ritual that made the oath-swearers into blood-brothers, documented by Herodotus among the (Mordvinic-speaking) Scythians, and others later about the Turks.
We search in the same place for another odd coda-cluster word from P-T.
And we find P-S "jürə" = "to get lost, lose one's way; to forget". It is part of a broader Uralic word-group, "jȣrɜ", whose main vowel is back, and so the P-S vowel is irregularly pulled forward by the "j" as Aikio said.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/j%C3%BCr%C9%99-
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=207
Seemingly related are Finno-Ugric verbs for "to turn, wind" = "jorkɜ", which could cause someone to lose their way by straying all over the place, which is the same semantic development as the English verbs "wend" and "wander". And "jorɜ" = "to roll", ditto. The root in P-U, underlying all these groups, looks like "jorɜ" or "jurɜ".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=191
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=192
That's the broader Uralic picture, so the Samoyedic word is of Uralic origin, not borrowed.