Language desk
< October 14	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 15

Mammoth

Some sources tentatively derive the ultimate etymology of mammoth from Proto-Mansi *mē̮ŋ-ońt (“earth-horn”, apparently the fossils sticking from the ground) and one Russian etymological dictionary prefers this version, saying that "initially the word mammoth designated not the animal, but its tusks". But this looks problematic because Proto-Uralic language and Proto-Indo-European language coincided with the mammoths' existence and habitat according to our articles, meaning those hunters should have had a word for the animal itself rather than its fossil tusks.

Does it mean that: a) Uralic and Indo-European languages discarded or lost the original word over time b) mammoth is basically the original word, since it also appears in isolated Basque language (as mamut), and the earth horn etymology is erroneous; c) something else? I found circumstantial evidence for the first option because Eskimos and some other native people of the North viewed mammoth tusks as remains of underground beasts that died from breathing open air - astonishingly bizarre belief given the knowledge of Stone Age hunters about mammoths that appears to have been lost in oral tradition. Brandmeister^talk 19:11, 15 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Proto-Indo-European language coincided with the mammoths' existence and habitat according to our articles . . . ."

I question this. As I read Mammoth, for example, in the Old World mammoths' existence in Siberia overlapped in time with PIE, but not in geography: I think it unlikely that PIE speakers or their ancestors of the previous couple of millennia ever encountered mammoths, with the possible exception of the Afanasievo culture, who however had migrated away from the rest of the PIE dispersion and so would be unlikely to pass back new vocabulary to it: an investigation for clues in the Proto-Tocharian language might be fruitful. PU is a more plausible candidate.

Regarding Basque, the crucial point is how far back the word can be show to have existed in Euskara. The Basques and their ancestors the Aquitanians (yeah, oversimplified) themselves were not isolated, although the terrain and culture of their sub-Pyrenean territory discouraged visitors from outside (which is likely why the language survived): some were seafarers or travelled for other reasons, and having learned of mammoths in their travels would naturally have adopted the name they had encountered. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.195.172.49 (talk) 20:32, 15 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that the Afanasievo Culture might have dispersed before the spread of the Yamnaya Culture, so it might most likely have been some sort of Pre-Proto-Indo-European culture... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:32, 15 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I digged PU as well and it appears that in most Uralic languages "mammoth" is also spelled similarly (Finnish mammutit, Estonian mammut, Hungarian mamut, Mari and Udmurtian мамонт, etc). If PU had a similar spelling, then the "earth horn" etymology again looks odd, as it's unclear why mammoth contemporaries would have used that word for dead animal's tusks only. Brandmeister^talk 08:47, 16 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The similar modern spellings are an almost dead certain indication that these are all simply modern loanwords from a common modern source – if they were genuine cognates from a proto-language, they would almost certainly have become modified to the point of near-unrecognizability through the multiple sound changes in each branch. Same goes, of course, to the IE languages and Basque. I think we can safely discard any possibility of descent through IE – even if some proto-IE speakers had known living Mammoth (which they didn't), the fact still remains that IE was spoken for millennia by people who knew no more about Mammoth than they knew about dinosaurs. So even if the proto-language had a word for them, there would have been no way for it to be passed down. PU was also separated from living Mammoth by several millennia, and geographically separated from the areas where you could find Mammoth bones in permafrost by thousands of miles. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:07, 16 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Future_Perfect_at_Sunrise -- There was a similar debate about the word for "wine" at Wiktionary. Some people seem to be anxious to reconstruct a word meaning "wine" into the Proto-Indo-European language itself, but it's hard to see how more than a small fraction of the Yamnaya etc. peoples could have ever been exposed to wine, and the migration paths of many of the IE subgroups would have taken them to areas geographically distant from wine-making activity for many centuries, casting great doubt on how any putative PIE word for "wine" could have survived in those language groups... AnonMoos (talk) 10:02, 16 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

AnonMoos — I wouldn't be so sure of early PIE speakers' ignorance of wine. Per our article, we have evidence of wine making from the Caucasus region 6000 years ago, and it's unlikely to represent wine's earliest or only manifestation. Just as bread- and beer-making likely extends back to hunter-gatherer societies' gathering wild grain (which inadvertently caused it to grow preferentially, eventually leading to agriculture), so probably does wine making arise from gathering wild grapes (and other fruits - let's not be purist) whose juice would readily ferment spontaneously in storage vessels. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.195.172.49 (talk) 06:47, 17 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

90.195.172.49 -- Vine-growing may have originated in 6000 B.C., but there is no evidence that it was present on the Pontic-Caspian steppe as of 3000 B.C., as far as I'm aware. As mentioned in the Wiktionary discussions, there was no long-distance trade in bulk commodities in that part of the world at that time, so it's very hard to see how the Yamnaya etc. peoples could have been exposed to wine unless they lived close to wine-making regions, which could only have been true for a small fraction of them. Also, as far as we can restruct it, the Proto-Indo-European language had only one vague general word for "grain". Local groups of early Indo-European speakers sometimes planted seeds if they expected they would be around at harvest time, but crop agriculture was probably not their main food source, and the groups moved around a lot over the long term, so their lifestyle was basically not compatible with tending vines in a single locality year after year... AnonMoos (talk) 12:57, 17 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

AnonMoos — grape vines do not have to be cultivated and tended: their wild form grows (or grew) very widely in both the Old and New Worlds, and hunter-gatherers have (in the former) doubtless been gathering wild grapes for at least hundreds of thousands of years. We are not talking about bulk production and trade, but about activity that any family or even an individual could engage in. Also, the Pontic-Caspian steppe cannot have been vegitatively identical throughout its expanse (let alone its borders), nor would it have had exactly the same climate 6,000+ years ago as it does today. I would be astonished if none of the earliest PIE speakers were familiar with (wild) grapes and the results of fermenting their juice. Whether this resulted in vocabulary inferable by us today is another matter. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.195.172.49 (talk) 20:00, 17 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I would doubt whether naturally-rambling untended vines would be too productive for winemaking, and if you're suggesting that they occasionally got buzzed on naturally-fermented berries (the way that birds sometimes do), that in itself would not indicate a wine culture. Face it, wine-making on any significant scale required a fixed infrastructure of carefully-tended vines, presses, vats, winejars, storage areas for the winejars, etc. The way of life of the early Indo-Europeans, often on the move and carrying all their possessions with them, was not compatible with such fixed infrastructure. AnonMoos (talk) 21:40, 17 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is conceivable though that the early Indo-Europeans, having discovered and enjoyed the buzz afforded by consuming naturally-fermented grape berries, started to purposely collect grapes on their treks and make a mash that they allowed to ferment before consuming it – foregoing presses, vats, bottling, and AoCs. Passing on the technique through the generations, they may have felt a need to invent a short term for this buzz-giving-rotten-grape-mush. --Lambiam 11:08, 18 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What's the evidence for this, or the modern ethnographic model?? (Of course bottles didn't exist until many centuries later, which is why I specified winejars.) And they certainly didn't "invent" the word for wine, which was found in various eastern Mediterranean cultures at the time that some of the Indo-European daughter branches entered the eastern Mediterranean area. For example, an early Semitic form reconstructed as *waynu(m) gave rise to the Hebrew word yayin as a result of various well-known sound changes. (Borrowing from non-IE to IE is much more likely than the reverse.) You guys are constructing elaborate speculative scenarios where somehow small-scale wine or quasi-wine production maybe could have flown beneath the archaeological radar, but the most natural and parsimonious hypothesis on the basis of the available evidence is that speakers of proto-Indo-European simply did not have wine. The burden of proof is on you, not me... AnonMoos (talk) 23:04, 18 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You claimed that fixed infrastructure is required for wine-making, and imply that hence there cannot have been a PIE term for wine. I counter that claim by suggesting a conceivable pathway. On whom rests the onus probandi, on me by producing evidence that this conceivable pathway was taken in historical reality, or on you by showing that the pathway cannot have been taken? --Lambiam 07:11, 19 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, that's not the case -- there is no concrete factual evidence indicating that Proto-Indo-European speakers had wine (except some highly-disputed proposed linguistic etymologies), and some general overall factors which combine to indicate that it was rather implausible that they had wine, so the default hypothesis is that they did not have wine. Your highly speculative and creative hypothetical scenarios aren't evidence of anything whatsoever except the healthy state of your imagination, so there's no obligation on me to try to refute them. You could postulate that Erich von Däniken's aliens descended from UFO's and handed them bottles of Two-Buck Chuck, and there would be no obligation on me to refute that hypothesis either. AnonMoos (talk) 22:06, 19 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If you argued against a claim that Von Däniken's aliens introduced hard liquor to ancient civilizations by stating that the cost of carrying booze-filled bottles in their UFOs would have been too expensive, energy-wise, I might object to this specific argument by pointing out that these hypothetical aliens might have made scientific advances affording them a virtually free source of energy. That would not mean that I support the claim that any aliens ever did such things, and I should not need to provide evidence for the hypothetical event occurring. It only means that I think the argument is not a valid one – neither more nor less. --Lambiam 09:18, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

AnonMoos — Picking up on something you wrote earlier: "wine-making on any significant scale required a fixed infrastructure of carefully-tended vines, presses, vats, winejars, storage areas for the winejars, etc."

I'm sorry, but you are fixating on much later forms of large-scale wine production that were developed centuries-to-millennia later. At its most basic, making wine (and cider – effectively "apple-wine" – and beer, and bread, and cheese, etc.) can and most commonly was done on a household basis, usually by a single individual. A drinkable, if not exactly grand cru, form of wine can be produced simply by squeezing grape (or other fruit) juice into a receptacle and leaving it for a week or so – natural yeasts that are ubiquitous in the environment and on the skins of grapes themselves will ferment and produce an appreciable (in both senses) admixture of alcohol. Heck, much as I'd prefer to brew beer in modern equipment with vessels containing hundreds of gallons (and I have), I could make a gallon (or more) of beer literally in a small hole in the ground – people have been doing so since time immemorial, and sometimes still do if other vessels are unavailable. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.212.157.244 (talk) 07:15, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pruno shows that you can make something to get you fucked up with very little technology at all. As noted, eating fruit that fell on the ground last week is often sufficient enough to get buzzed on, and it's not a far leap from "hey, eating this fruit makes me feel funny in a way I like" to "maybe I can optimize the process that does this". As noted at History of alcoholic drinks, the consumption of alcoholic fruits predates humans, so also predates language. Any human language would have developed alongside getting drunk, and it would have not had to create novel words out of whole cloth for a newly-discovered technology. --Jayron 32 12:32, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I guess it might possibly be some kind of wanderwort. Anyway, it probably isn't Indo-European in its origin. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:39, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The "occasionally buzzed on berries" hypothesis has a certain quasi-plausibility, but it's basically irrelevant to the issue of whether Proto-Indo-European itself had a word for "wine", or whether an eastern Mediterranean word (also occurring in Semitic, etc) was borrowed separately into multiple IE daughter branches around the times when their speakers entered into regions where wine-making was practiced. Wiktionary reconstructs a laryngeal sound h₁ in the putative PIE root for "wine" which there's no direct evidence of, and which likely never existed in the real world (a pure pseudo-etymological phantom)... AnonMoos (talk) 21:04, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It does when one of the major points of contention you seem to make is that the PIE speakers would not have had the concept of wine to make a word to signify it. I have no idea whether or not they did. But there is no reason that they couldn't have, given that they had something in their lives to attach such a word to. "Rotten happy-making fruit" existed and was undoubtedly known to such people; to pursue a line of thinking that they wouldn't have had any word for such a concept. The general academic consensus is that your statement "there is no concrete factual evidence indicating that Proto-Indo-European speakers had wine" is false; for a broad enough definition of wine. That, of course, doesn't mean that they had a word which is cognate to the modern word of wine; but the entire crux of your argument rests on insecure footing. If you are going to make your argument, find a new basis for it. Your current one doesn't work. --Jayron 32 10:55, 21 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but the leap from occasionally being buzzed on berries to active wine-making is another hypothetical speculation or Just-so story which is not evidence of anything in itself, but would need external supporting evidence to be seriously considered. And there are various etymological dictionaries which trace the word back to the eastern Mediterranean (not PIE). The "consensus" is a Wiktionary consensus, largely determined by one active user there... AnonMoos (talk) 21:28, 22 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging @Brandmeister: Basque mamut comes either from Spanish mamut or from French mammouth. A large part of Basque lexicon is from Romance. For example, there are two words for "flower": Lore is from Latin florem and lili from Latin lilium. Basque managed to lose its heritage word and, unlike mammoths, flowers are very present in Basque lands. --Error (talk) 01:40, 19 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suspected that, but initially thought that as a language isolate and the last remnant of a pre-Indo-European language family Basque had less loanwords than IE languages. Brandmeister^talk 14:46, 19 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As a language isolate, it has historical roots unrelated to IE languages, but it is also part of the Iberian sprachbund, and as such, there are a LOT of words moving back and forth between languages like Spanish, Basque, and Portuguese, even though Basque has no historical connection to the other two. --Jayron 32 12:36, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I would also presume that the impact of Romance on Basque has been bigger than the other way around, although that's only a qualified guess. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:13, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Etymological Dictionary of Basque:

This native lexicon includes pronouns and most grammatical words, numerals, many body-part names, most basic adjectives (including some colour terms), a sizeable number of names of wild and domesticated plants and animals (though quite a few such names are borrowed), almost all words for weather and natural phenomena like the sun and the moon, most names of geographical features, some tool names, a few names of metals, names of familiar materials like wood and stone, most kinship terms, all the words like ‘man’ and ‘girl’, a scattering of agricultural and pastoral terms, and the great majority of basic verbs. Unsurprisingly absent from the native lexicon are words pertaining to law and administration, to religion, to education, to literature, and to commerce. More surprisingly absent are nautical terms: in spite of the long seafaring traditions of the Basques, there is perhaps not a single nautical term which is native. There are also very few native words pertaining to social organization or to cooking, and there are almost no native words for weapons. [...] But Basque has been in intense contact with a number of identifiable neighbouring languages for well over 2000 years, and these languages have had an immense effect on its lexicon.

There very few clear borrowings from Basque into other languages.

--Error (talk) 23:34, 20 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There is some Basque influence on Spanish, however. [1], [2]. --Jayron 32 11:00, 21 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at [3], there seems to be very few words of Basque origin that have been adopted into general Spanish. Most of the examples seem to be "ethnolectally coded" terms, or whatever the proper terminology is. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:23, 21 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]