That's a *móri

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Following up on Rapscallion, here's another culinary pun with a lexico-musical connection:

When two names far apart
Share a PIE start
That's a *móri…

[image or embed]

— New-Cleckit Dominie (@ncdominie.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 11:57 AM

In the unlikely event that the musical reference escapes you, it's Dean Martin's 1953 hit That's Amore:

And here's what Wiktionary thinks about PIE *móri.



13 Comments »

  1. Dick Margulis said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 11:13 am

    And, of course, this version: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/14194579

  2. Roscoe said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 1:01 pm

    See also the two Galicias (Spain and Eastern Europe).

  3. J.W. Brewer said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 2:06 pm

    The current Gaelic spelling for "Moray" is said to be Moireibh or Moireabh and the lack of a final consonant in the English spelling is presumably because word-final "bh" is these days silent in Gaelic. But the pronunciation may have been otherwise 900 years ago, with the phoneme then represented by the now-silent "bh" (or its predecessor under somewhat different orthographic conventions) being Latinized as "v." If you believe the wikipedia etymologies (which for I know may be speculative but have no less speculative alternative), both Moireibh and what's currently spelled Morava in Czech are etymologically two-morpheme compounds, with the first morpheme indeed having the same PIE etymon but any resemblance between the second morphemes being coincidental.

  4. Philip Taylor said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 2:47 pm

    « word-final "bh" is these days silent in Gaelic » — is that invariably the case, JWB ? What about Cobh (in Éire), pronounced /kəʊv/ ? Or were you referring strictly to Scots Gaelic rather than the wider Goidelic family ?

  5. J.W. Brewer said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 4:28 pm

    @Philip Taylor: I was speaking of the current Scottish Gaelic orthographic conventions, since I should have thought it obvious that those are what would be relevant to a Scottish toponym. The spelling in the Gaeilge wikipedia entry is FWIW identical to that in the Gaidhlig wikpedia entry and also (without getting hung up on initial consonant mutation) to that in the Gaelg (i.e. "Manx") entry, but I don't know whether folks down around Cobh use a spelling pronunciation that adds an audible final consonant.

  6. J.W. Brewer said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 4:41 pm

    Note FWIW that a different wikipedia article offers three old-time spellings: "Middle Irish: Muréb; Medieval Latin: Moravia; Old Norse: Mýræfi." This back when "Middle Irish" covered both Ireland and the Goidelic-speaking parts of Scotland and there were no Scottish/Irish distinctions in orthography. (Perhaps there were already regional differences in pronunciation that were ignored by the fairly small literate/scribal class?) The same article claims it's more likely than not that it's not originally a Goidelic toponym but was instead inherited from Pictish. I can't immediately ascertain what the Old Norse for the Czech Moravia might have been, but it modern Icelandic it seems to have been clipped down to Mæri.

  7. Chris Button said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 7:02 pm

    Coincidently, yesterday I was just reading Edwin Pulleyblank's suggestion that *mori could be related to 海. Its unexpected Middle Chinese reflex does make the standard Old Chinese reconstruction problematic. Could he be onto something?

  8. Seonachan said,

    November 4, 2024 @ 10:00 pm

    Final bh is usually pronounced as "v" in Scottish Gaelic. There are exceptions, but Moireibh isn't one of them. Here's a clip from BBC Alba where you can hear it pronounced at the 0:21 mark and again at 1:18:

    https://www.bbc.com/naidheachdan/fbh/24132941

  9. Philip Taylor said,

    November 5, 2024 @ 4:45 am

    JWB — " I don't know whether folks down around Cobh use a spelling pronunciation that adds an audible final consonant" — well, I was there very recently, and heard only /kəʊv/. /kəʊ/ would seem unlikely to me, as I would expect word-final "bh" to be silent only in polysyllabic words if at all.

  10. Philip Anderson said,

    November 7, 2024 @ 3:08 pm

    The loss of the final consonant seems to have only happened in Lowland Scots, in both the region and the toponymic surname. The latter is usually spelt Murray now, which is how both are pronounced. Murref is found, alongside de Moravia, in documents.

  11. David Marjanović said,

    November 9, 2024 @ 12:48 pm

    Wikipedia on the Czech one:

    The region and former margraviate of Moravia, Morava in Czech, is named after its principal river Morava. It is theorized that the river's name is derived from Proto-Indo-European *mori: "waters", or indeed any word denoting water or a marsh.[13]

    The German name for Moravia is Mähren, from the river's German name March. This could have a different etymology, as march is a term used in the Medieval times for an outlying territory, a border or a frontier (cf. English march). In Latin, the name Moravia was used.

    Yay, folk etymology… except a march in German isn't March/i> (as the river is!), it's Mark. The second members of consonant clusters did not become fricatives in the High German consonant shift.

    I bet, in any case, that the -ava part was reinterpreted in German as -au, which today means "gallery forest" but shows up in the names of many rivers and floodplains; maybe it was then replaced by -ach(e), another common ending of river names.

    In Germanic prehistory, BTW, the ancestors of -au(e) and -ach(e) are Verner and Grimm versions of the cognate of Latin aqua.

    Unfortunately, footnote 13 is an article in the Young Front of 1982; I don't think the Young Pioneers published actual linguistics papers.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    en.wiktionary goes no farther than:

    "From Mediaeval Latin Moravia, which is named after River Morava, (German March, Latin Marus), the main river of the land. The water's name is in all likelihood derived ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *móri."

    …and de.wiktionary, as often, says nothing at all.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    It looks like the supposed Latin name Marus of the river is a medieval or even later invention.

  12. Chris Button said,

    November 18, 2024 @ 10:50 am

    Coincidently, yesterday I was just reading Edwin Pulleyblank's suggestion that *mori could be related to 海. Its unexpected Middle Chinese reflex does make the standard Old Chinese reconstruction problematic. Could he be onto something?

    To answer my own question: no, I don't think he is correct.

    The phonetic in 海 is 每 not 母. And, contrary to common analyses (and linking back to an earlier observation by Bill Boltz about co-phonetics), I think the phonetic in 每 is 來 (via a shift of ʁ > β > ʋ > m). So the later x- onset of 海 goes back to an earlier x- and not ʰm- as 母 might suggest.

  13. Vampyricon said,

    November 30, 2024 @ 3:28 pm

    One may dispute whether this is more or less relevant than the original, but here is a song called That's A Moray: https://youtu.be/SezOrE0zRFo

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