About luths and guitars

This is a very ancient depiction of a Sumerian man playing luth. This instrument was called gude in that language. Quite certainly this Sumerian word is in turn the origin of Greek κιθάρα, itself the etymon of the word guitar.


It can be noted that apparently the consonants of the root κιθ- of Greek κιθάρα seem to differ from those of Sumerian gude. But this is an illusion. Once borrowed gude or maybe gide (?) becomes *ghidh- hence Greek kith-, with the predictable dissimilation of aspiration in Greek. This word is another example of PIE aspirates corresponding to voiced phonemes.

This is a Kurdish Tambûr, a direct continuator of Ancient gude.

All the best. A.

About elephants and ivory

The word ivory comes from Latin ebur with the same meaning. Etymological dictionaries of Latin usually do not provide a particular origin for ebur itself. Ebur is quite certainly an Ancient Egyptian word. It can be compared with three words with similar shape and related meanings:

- Coptic ab, eb 'elephant' from Egyptian jb, hence from *ˀib, with vowel *i according to the same sound change as in *lis 'tongue', hence Coptic las, les. This word has a derivative *jbr 'ivory' from which Latin most probably comes.
- Egyptian ḥb 'ivory', from which Semitic words most probably derive: Akkadian sinn-iburi 'tooth of ivory', Ugaritic ḥbn 'ivory', etc.
- Egyptian ˁb 'tooth'.

All three words have a guttural /ˀ/, /ḥ/, /ˁ/ followed by /b/ in relationship with elephant, ivory or tooth. This amounts to a kind of phonosemantic matrix. What is interesting is to compare Egyptian *ˀib 'elephant' with Sanskrit ibha with the same meaning. This is certainly not a chance coincidence. Sanskrit ibha is a loanword from some Indian substrate *ib. It can be noted that the phoneme /b/ of Egyptian and of the Pre-Sanskrit substrate has become /bh/ in Sanscrit.

More to come soon.

A.

About Greek pithekos 'monkey'

Pithecanthropus (noun). An extinct primate postulated from bones found in Java in 1891 and originally designated as Pithecanthropus erectus because it was thought to represent a species evolutionarilybetween apes and human beings. Pithecanthropus is now classified as Homo erectus.
[Scientific Neo-Latin, genus name : Greek pithekos, ape + Greek anthropos, man.]

Greek πίθηκος 'ape, monkey' is a loanword of undetermined origin.
I propose to compare it with Berber *abidaw 'monkey', a masculine word based on a root bid, and Chadic *bidi 'monkey'. It is interesting to note that the voiced phonemes of Berber and Chadic root R=*bid have been adjusted in Greek as Pre-Greek *bhidh, that is Greek pith, instead of **bid.
This is in line with the Glottalic theory of Proto-Indo-European and this issue will be discussed in coming posts.

Greetings. A.

About the word cumin

It seems that the word cumin has never been etymologized. It derives from a Near-Eastern source through Latin and Greek. Greek κύμινον itself seems to share a triliteral root kmn with a number of Semitic languages, for example Old Akkadian kamūnum, or Arabic kamūn كَمُون. This can be shown to be an illusion. This plant comes from Central Asia where it is frequently called the ‘black seed’: Tadjik siyoh dona (‘black seed’) or Hindi kala jeera (‘black cumin’).

There exists an Afrasian root *km ‘black’. It can be found in Hieroglyphic Egyptian: km ‘black’, Coptic kmom ‘to become black’, hence a Feminine form km-t for the earth, the mud that Egyptians farmers used to till, and by metonymy Egypt itself: Coptic kême, from an ancient vocalic scheme *kūmat. It must be noted that the skeleton kmn of Greek is an illusion because κύμινον is in fact a base κύμ- suffixed by -ινον, a productive suffix that exists in other lexemes like σέλινον ‘parsley’. In that paradigm of plant names accent falls regularly on the first syllabe. What must be explained is therefore only the base *kum, for the suffix -ινον is Greek. The origin of the base can be found in Aramean (ˀa)kūm ‘black’. Both names are attested in Mycenian Greek: ku-mi-no and se-ri-no. The third nasal is identical by chance coincidence because Semitic words are independent derivatives of the root *km ‘black’.

About the English word 'house'

The English word 'house' derives from *huus, a Germanic root of non-Indo-European ancestry.
It would seem that *huus can be satisfactorily compared with a Semitic word *hus.s.u 'hut', attested in Arabic hus.s.u 'reed hut', which probably also has connections with Yeniseian *hu?s 'house'. The Semitic word was borrowed into Armenian huts' 'hut, room, cellar'.
Germanic is probably a loanword but this root is ancient, potentially of Nostratic origin.

All the best. A.

some information about me

Dear All,

I noticed that I now have three followers. I must say that I am very much moved by this new feature happening on my humble blog. People who are interested in learning more about me and my papers are invited to go at the following address:
http://independent.academia.edu/ArnaudFournet

I've posted one survey of Kassite, among others.

All the best.

A.

Sumerian supposedly a Uralic language

A recent theory has it that Sumerian is to be considered closely related to Uralic. It is proposed by Simo Parpola, an assyriologist:
<http://www.s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/42TurkicAndSumer/SimoParpola_Altaic-UralicAndSumerEn.htm>
This is not the first time that such an idea is proposed: other people have proposed that Sumerian was closely related to Hungarian. The difference in that case is that the theory is proposed by a scientist, well-known for his expertise on Assyrian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_Parpola

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So what is to be thought of that "new" theory?

To start with:
On the whole, issues of genetic relationships are twofold:
Q1: why should Sumerian be considered related to Uralic at all?
Q2: why should Sumerian be considered more related to Uralic than to other families?

Just to take one example, the paper states that Sumerian may have had labiovelars like *kw or *gw and alternations like b/g may originate in such phonemes. Why not after all?
But this raises a number of issues:
Q1: is this the only way to explain that graphic alternation? => I'm afraid not.
Q2: now, assuming that the idea is correct, then we can see that Sumerian igi, ibi "eye", possibly from *igwi according to that line of reasoning, is structurally the same as Proto-Indo-European *Hekw "eye". So we can just as well promote the idea that Sumerian has ties with PIE as well.
Q3: note that Uralic Vogul-Mansi has a verb ankw- "to see", suggesting that ultimately all these languages: Sumerian, PIE, Uralic may be related. It's not unusual that Uralic has a kind of infixal -n-.
=> in that case the correct framework to investigate Sumerian's relationships is Nostratic.
It is indeed probable that Sumerian is to be included in the Nostratic superfamily. The issue is then: in which place and which subfamily?

Next,
The theory proposed has it that Sumerian is closely related to Uralic at a very recent dating. In fact this dating, about 5000 years ago, would make Sumerian a Uralic language, if Sumerian is indeed related to any single one Uralic language on that basis. Relationship at such a recent dating means *inclusion* within Uralic perimeter not relationship with Uralic.
=> this seems impossible at first glimpse.

The common lore about Proto-Uralic is that the original Uralic community originates in a Paleolithic culture. This is a point that Mr. Parpola does not seem to know, assyriology being his core expertise. The claim that there are "common words for cereals, sowing and harvesting, domestic animals, wheeled vehicles, and the harness of draught animals" between Uralic and Sumerian is not far from nonsense. From the Uralic point of view, such words can only be either loanwords, wanderworts or innovations. Most of them happen to be of PIE or IE origin.
A typical case for example is:
Sumerian urudu "copper"
PIE *Hreudh- "red"
Finnish rauta "ore"
A clear wanderwort of probable PIE origin.
Similarly (eastern dialectal) PIE *yewos "grain" => ancient loanword PU *yuw, Finnish jyvä. One more wanderwort. Etc.

Next,
It must be borne in mind that Finnish and more generally Finno-Baltic is not especially representative of (Proto-)Uralic phonology. These languages have a high frequency of vowels in words and a rather simple syllabic structure of the CvCv type. This feature makes it easy to compare Finnish (or Finno-Baltic) with about anything else with a similar structure.
For example Finnish can be easily compared with Tamil or Dravidian. Most of these comparisons crumble when they are put back in the Uralic perspective.
In that respect it is especially troublesome that Sumerian seems to have strong ties with Finno-Baltic and very poor ties with Altaic. This is a telltale indication that the conclusion of the theory is an artefact of the comparanda taken into account.
In all cases the discussion of the relationships between Uralic and Sumerian only makes sense, when putative close relatives of Uralic like Yukaghir are involved. What does that theory teach us on the relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir?

For example, as regards the word "brain": 1. Sumerian ugu, "top of the head," "brain."
2. From the Uralic PoV the reconstruction as *ajkwo "brain, top of the head" is completely unacceptable and procrustean. The usual reconstruction for Finno-Ugric is *ajN "temple, skull", secondarily "brain, marrow". Samoyedic is *oN-pu "temple". It is possible that Finno-Ugric *ajN is a kind of compound < *aj-oN- or the like. What is to be compared is *oN- with ugu. Apparently Sumerian is ugu not **ug~u. So it does not work on phonetic grounds. => Status: highly dubious.
In all cases it makes no sense to compare Sumerian with Uralic when Uralic data are not properly dealt with.

Miscellaneous issues,
there is no Volgaic word kurok "mountain". In Mordvin kurok means "quick, soon" = Russian skoro. In all cases, kurok, if it exists at all and is not a recent borrowing of Russian gora, can be related to some reflex of PIE *gwer- mountain, which makes sense as a cognate of Sumerian kur "mountain". And we are back to the starting point that Sumerian has fairly strong ties with PIE, which may be much clearer and more workable than the alleged ties with Uralic.

As a preliminary diagnosis, I would classify that theory as amateurish and underinformed. I'm afraid there is no "constructive criticism" possible.

Best

A.

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