Tocharo-Sinica and Sogdo-Sinica
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Exchange between VHM and Chris Button:
VHM:
I just heard a lecture on Tocharian by Gerd Carling, and she said that the word for "enter" in Toch. is something like "yip". That jerked me to the edge of my seat, since it is identical to the pronunciation of 入 ("enter") in many Sinitic topolects.
The verb is well grounded on the Tocharian side. This is from the etymological section of Doug Adams dictionary or Tocharian:
■TchA yäw– and B yäp– reflect PTch yäp– (though at least the preterite participle yaiwu in A shows the influence of B [VW:605]). PTch *yäp– is from PIE *yebh– ‘go, enter (into)’ seen in Hieroglyphic Luvian iba– ‘west’ (for a discussion of the latter word, and different conclusions, see Puhvel, 1984:375-377) < *ibho– and Greek zóphos ‘dusk, gloom, (north)west,’ and Greek zéphuros ‘(north)west [wind]’ (< *yobh– and *yebh– respectively). For the semantic development of Hieroglyphic Luvian iba– one should compare Greek dúsis ‘west’ from dúō ‘get, get into’ and the TchB kauṃ yäp– ‘set [of sun]’). The Tocharian and Hittite words are to be connected with *yebh– ‘futuere’ [: Greek oíphō (< *o– + ibh-), Sanskrit yábhati, OCS jebǫ (P:298; 508)], the meaning ‘futuere’ coming from ‘penetrate’ (Winter, 1998:349; cf. Beekes, 2010:1063-1064). The connection with yábhati is VW’s (1941) but later (1976:605) he suggests a phonetically impossible development from a PIE *(e)ieu-. Malzahn (2017:283-284) adds, on the basis of Cheung, 2007:213, an Iranian cognate *ya(m)p/b-‘move, wander, rove, crawl’ and takes the antecedent Proto-Indo-European to have meant ‘go, move (slowly) inside.’
Chris Button:
I recall that once coming up in passing on LLog. The OC onset does not have a palatal component, so any connection would be going into Tocharian once OC had developed the palatalized nasal on its way into EMC. However, is there any particular reason to believe it is a loan in Tocharian if it has connections elsewhere in PIE?
On a separate matter, I was looking at líng 綾 for my dictionary. Finding no evidence for an internal origin, I looked around and came across a 1945 article "Two central Asian words" by W. B. Henning that implies, albeit not explicitly, an association with Sogdian pring/pryng "damask". Henning even suggests the Sogdian form may have come from something like *upa-ringa (available for download here). It seems pretty compelling to me!
I agree with the gist of Chris' remarks on yip ("enter"). Despite the uncanny semantic and phonetic resemblance, it may be purely coincidental. 入 ("enter") has solid etymological and glyphic basis in Sinitic, and, as I pointed out in my initial inquiry, yip ("enter") has a good foundation in Tocharian. On the other hand, líng 綾 ("damask") is a technical and lexical innovation in Sinitic, while Sogdian pring/pryng "damask" fits squarely within the textile development of the early Middle Ages Byzantine and Middle Eastern weaving centers.
Selected readings
- "Tocharo-Sinica" (5/13/24)
- "The Wool Road of Northern Eurasia" (4/12/21) — with lengthy bibliography
- "What a prehistoric pair of pretty pants can tell us about the spread of early languages" (4/3/21)
[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]
M. Paul Shore said,
July 3, 2024 @ 11:33 am
Another potential objection is that it’s somewhat unlikely, though of course not impossible, that a principal word for a basic concept like “enter” would be borrowed from another language. Although that’s an ironic objection to come from a speaker of English, since the English word “enter” is itself a borrowing!
Cervantes said,
July 3, 2024 @ 12:11 pm
I dunno about that M. Paul, half the modern English vocabulary comes from French. English is essentially a creole. So there's no real comparison.
M. Paul Shore said,
July 3, 2024 @ 12:49 pm
I admit that the comparison I implied in the second sentence of my post is a loose one, but I wanted to make it anyway, particularly because I was concerned that someone might pipe up and say (in effect) “Hey, you fool, don’t you realize that English ‘enter’ Is itself a borrowing?”. Needless to say, the basic point I expressed in my first sentence is unaffected by this.
Cervantes said,
July 3, 2024 @ 1:05 pm
Sure. I don't know how common borrowings from Tocharian to Sinitic may be — the experts here seem to find this unlikely — but it's certainly not impossible, they were neighbors.
Philip Taylor said,
July 3, 2024 @ 1:31 pm
MPS — Isn't the crucial factor not whether a principal word for a basic concept [such as “enter”] would be borrowed from another language, but rather whether the borrowed word is the sole word in the borrower language ? To take your example of "enter", in British English this can also be expressed as "go in" — both "go" and "in" are shewn as "Old English" in the OED.
M. Paul Shore said,
July 3, 2024 @ 4:40 pm
It seems to me that the crucial point would be not whether the term was the sole term—a rare situation, I suspect—but just whether it was a principal one, as opposed to an obscure or niche one (such as, for example, the ultimately French-derived “sashay in”).
Martin Schwartz said,
July 3, 2024 @ 6:45 pm
Contra Henning, Sogd. *pring ~ Pers. parand (cf. aurang > aurand)
see Souren Asadullah Melikian-Chirvani, "Parand and Parniyān Identified", BAI 5.
Re Toch. and Chin. 'enter' I tend to side with M. Paul Shore.
Coincidences are galore. From Henning I learned the example of
Eng. bad: Pers. bad [bæd] 'bad', etymologically unconnected
For this occasion, I note Coptic ei- (Anc. Eg. consonantallt spelled iy
(ij) 'to come': Gr. eîmi, Lat. eo ire 'to go', Pers. āy- 'to come'.
But I cannot disprove the Toch.-Chin. borrowing.
Martin Schwartz
Chris Button said,
July 4, 2024 @ 2:56 am
@ Martin Schwartz
Why contra?
languagehat said,
July 4, 2024 @ 8:49 am
Coincidences are galore.
This is all that needs to be said.
Philip Taylor said,
July 4, 2024 @ 11:41 am
MPS — It seems to me that the crucial point would be not whether the term was the sole term—a rare situation, I suspect—but just whether it was a principal one — fair enough. But would you say that "enter" is the principal word to describe that activity ? In my idiolect, "go in" would be far more common (and therefore "principal", IMHO).
M. Paul Shore said,
July 4, 2024 @ 3:45 pm
PT: In my original post, I wrote “a principal word for a basic concept like ‘enter’” with the idea that that would convey that there could be more than one such principal word or term, but I see now that that was not clear. I should’ve written “one of the principal terms for a basic concept like ‘enter’”. “Go in” and “come in” are of course also principal terms for the concept.
Victor Mair said,
July 5, 2024 @ 2:01 pm
@languagehat:
"Coincidences are galore.
This is all that needs to be said."
Not so. Supporting evidence to prove or at least indicate that it is a coincidence is desirable. The resemblance might actually indicate a connection / relationship, but that also has to be proven. It is best not to be simplistic or arbitrary in either direction.
David Marjanović said,
July 5, 2024 @ 3:54 pm
And easily available: it is well known that the southern y in this and many other Sinitic words is a development from an earlier [ɲ] or thereabouts, which has also, separately, developed into the northern Mandarin r. That greatly reduces the phonetic similarity to: 1) a final labial plosive and 2) some sort of not too back and not too open vowel.
BTW, there's no need to assume a mysterious meaningless prefix *o- that conveniently occurs only in Greek. Rather, oíphō is most likely a reduplicated present.
David Marjanović said,
July 5, 2024 @ 4:01 pm
argh argh argh
It's not reduplicated. Most likely, says the very article I linked to, it's a zero-grade ( = suffix-stressed) thematic present, *h₃ibʰ-é/ó-, with the stress shifted in Greek because Greek does that with verbs.
Peter Grubal said,
July 5, 2024 @ 5:03 pm
@Victor Mair
"Coincidences are galore.
This is all that needs to be said.
Not so. Supporting evidence to prove or at least indicate that it is a coincidence is desirable"
Demanding that it be proven that it is a coincidence is asking to prove a negative, which is impossible with finite resources.
The burden of proof is surely on those who say it is not a coincidence.
M. Paul Shore said,
July 5, 2024 @ 7:13 pm
Note that VHM didn’t demand that coincidence be proven: he merely said “[s]upporting evidence to prove or at least indicate that [something] is a coincidence is desirable” (my italics). The strong seemingly unrelated etymologies on the respective Sinitic and Tocharian sides fill the “indicate” requirement pretty well.
This whole post and comment thread, about an etymological connection suspected but not made, reminds me of the mention in a Sherlock Holmes story of the curious incident of the dog that did nothing in the nighttime.