Zoroastrian "heaven"

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[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

I think I might finally have figured out heaven: 
 
tiān 天 LMC tʰian, EMC tʰɛn, OC xjəm
xiān 祆 LMC xian, EMC xɛn, OC xəɲ ~ xjəm
 
It's Pulleyblank's formulation (xj- > tʰ ; -jəm > -ɛn), but it also explains why x- is retained in 祆 because of it using the intermediary stage -əɲ (between OC -jəm and EMC -ɛn) as the OC source of the EMC form (where OC x- > EMC x-) rather than -jəm (where OC xj- > EMC tʰ-).

As discussed by Pulleyblank elsewhere (e.g. with 年 vs 稔 ), the palatalization of the coda in -ɛn < -jəm only occurs in ping sheng (to overlap with regular -ɛn < -əɲ). So, the xiesheng derivative tiǎn 忝 "shame" (with 天 as phonetic) regularly reconstructs as LMC tʰiam´, EMC tʰɛmˀ, OC xjᵊmɁ with EMC ɛmˀ rather than ɛnˀ.
 
Two further things to consider: 
  1. 丁 does not after all appear to be phonetic in 天 despite it sometimes appearing that way in the earliest inscriptions.
  2. The source of Indo-European "heaven" seems to be unresolved. Pokorny suggests (s)kʲəm- "cover" as the source of the words "heaven" and "shame". Semantically, that happens to compare with 天 "heaven" and 忝 "shame" in Chinese. And then if we really want to speculate, OC xjəm and IE kʲəm- do look rather similar, but that is most likely coincidental!

Selected readings

 



34 Comments »

  1. AntC said,

    January 23, 2025 @ 6:20 pm

    I think I might finally have figured out heaven:

    lol. Celestial enlightenment — at least for someone. Thank vou, that thought cheered up my morning, although the rest of the post went over my head.

  2. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 24, 2025 @ 2:22 am

    We could also make the parallel with Tian 天 and linear B (Mycenean) Di / di-we / di-wo "God of the sky" as the earlier mentioned parallel Wang –> Wanax

  3. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 24, 2025 @ 4:15 am

    Di-Wo:
    https://www.palaeolexicon.com/Word/Show/16635

  4. Chris Button said,

    January 24, 2025 @ 11:22 am

    @ Lucas Christopoulos

    How are you connecting *xjəm with that though? The phonology seems way off.

    I think like 帝 *tɐcs (from *tjɐks) in its sense of "the binder/unifier", my hunch is that there is no external influence. But I couldn't resist throwing Pokorny's form out there (I treated the IE "e" as "ə").

    The possible semantic connection between 天 xjəm "heaven" and 忝 xjəmɁ "shame" is nice though–regardless of the phonological reconstruction.

  5. Chris Button said,

    January 24, 2025 @ 11:48 am

    @ AntC

    lol. Celestial enlightenment

    I chuckled as I wrote that too.

    The post actually comes from an email I sent to Prof. Mair, who kindly suggested making it into a guest post. So, apologies for the esoteric language.

    In a nutshell, I'm trying to get the pronunciation "tiān" of 天 (from earlier tʰian ← tʰɛn ← xjəm) and the pronunciation "xiān" of 祆 (from earlier ← xian ← xɛn ← xəɲ ← xjəm) from the same original pronunciation of xjəm.

  6. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 24, 2025 @ 8:36 pm

    @ Chris Button
    Yes, Di 帝 here with Hu Shih: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67593

  7. Martin Schwartz said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 1:36 am

    @Chris Button: Chris, forgive me, but your PIE etymon is a
    (possibly accidental) er, scam. Many relate Himmel etc., Avestan and Old Persian asman-(sic, pace Wiktionary) 'heaven' to Lithuanian akmuõ,
    Gr. ákmōn, cf. Pokorny 19; probably (from *h2k'mé/ón-) the words for
    'stone' (and 'heaven' listed in Pokorny 255-256, at the end of which
    connection with "shame" is regarded as "unglaubhaft", i.e. incredible;
    the schwa, which implies laryngeal, seems to be your invention.
    Are you deriving (Middle?) Sinitic from semi-Pokornian Proto-Indo-European? Of course a real "Zoroastrian" word for 'heaven'
    woud be OIr. asman-, Middle Iranian asmān, useless for your purposes, no? @ Lucas Christopoulos: Your Linear B form di-wo would be gen.
    of the form underlying Gr. Zeûs, PIE nom. *dyēus, gen diwós 'heaven'
    (somewhat inaccurately Palaeolexicon).
    Perhaps you quote the Linear B form because of the ostensible visual
    similarity to the Chinese, but aren't the Myc. syllabic symbols from
    Linear A, and do you want to see early Cretan influence on China?
    Btw, is there any chance in heaven or (hades) that "tien" vel
    sim. is from Sogdian ∂ēn 'religion', not that I would suggest it.
    Martin Schwartz

  8. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 2:10 am

    @Martin Schwartz
    I think that it was the Myceneans that had far contact with China because of the international Bronze-Tin trade between big military powers all over Eurasia.

    Trade means contacts and contacts means communication and influence somehow.

    "During the Late Bronze Age, the mining regions of Central Asia involved small communities of highlander pastoralists located in rugged terrain far from any empire or industrial hub. With this in mind, researchers — along with the help of historians and archeologists — unveiled a complex supply chain that included several small mining communities that worked to deliver tin to the Mediterranean marketplace."

    https://www.courthousenews.com/tin-from-bronze-age-shipwreck-reveals-complex-trade-network/

  9. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 8:45 am

    @ Martin Schwartz

    Yout're quite right about Pokorny. I should instead have cited the discussion on pages 183-184 of Winfred Lehmann's "A Gothic Etymologcial Dictionary" (1986). Still, it seems hardly settled.

    As noted, I think any phonological connection with PIE is coincidental. I'm more interested in how "heaven" 天/祆 *xjəm and "shame" 忝 *xjəmɁ might connect etymologically in Old Chinese and how semantic support may be found elsewhere for that.

    As for schwa for PIE "e", that was a mechanical replacement as noted to Lucas Christopoulos above (I follow proposals to treat PIE e/o as ultimately coming from ə/a).

  10. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 8:50 am

    And Lehmann p.309 as well on "shame" although he notes its possible rejection too.

  11. David Marjanović said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 10:00 am

    xj- > tʰ

    Seriously?

    linear B (Mycenean) Di / di-we / di-wo "God of the sky"

    Why so specific? *diwós "heavenly" goes straight back to PIE.

  12. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 10:26 am

    @ David Marjanović

    Yes, it merges with ɬ (> tʰ) in one particular conditioning environment (an eminently reasonable merger). Oherwise the reflex is different and more what you might "seriously" expect. Pulleyblank is aware of this. I recommend you read his two ganzhi articles.

  13. David Marjanović said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 10:50 am

    Oh, [xj] and [ɬ] merging makes sense. Then I suppose [ɬ] "strengthens" to [tɬ] Icelandic-style and eventually merges into [tʰ]?

    I recommend you read his two ganzhi articles.

    Where are they?

  14. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 11:30 am

    See the selected readings. It's brought up in 1991 and then discussed further in the 1995 emendation.

  15. Yves Rehbein said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 11:54 am

    @ Chris, I see two options for what you are asking. I will not try to defend these.

    Going by the "bright, shiny" sense of our lord and savior sky father Dius Pater in the bright shiny object school of linguistics I have to think of German Schamesröte, the blushing red of shame.

    Actually that's it. I forgot the second option after writing a whole paragraph to defend this one, before I remembered my conviction not to.

    Total non-sequitur: How does that hold up against jīn 金 OC /*k(r)[ə]m/ (B & S)?

  16. katarina said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 2:50 pm

    Regarding @Lucas Christopoulos, @ Martin Schwartz , et al.
    and Linear B form di-wo, Linear A, etc.

    In her Sino-Platonic Paper "Huangdi and Huntun", 2005, Julie Wei has proposed that Chinese mythical figure Chiyou 蚩尤 in the Huangdi (Yellow Emperor) ancient Chinese myth was Zeus (also Ziu, Tiu, Tir, etc in Greek, German, and other IE languages).

    Chiyou 蚩尤 is reconstructed
    蚩/*tʰjɯ/ 尤 /*[ɢ]ʷə/, /*ɢʷɯ/ (Wiktioary)

    roughly *tjewa , very similar to Linear B *di-wo.

    Moreover, Chiyou in the Yellow Emperor(Huangdi)
    myth was a sky-god who
    commanded wind and rain. The Yellow Emperor was also a
    sky-god. Wei's paper sees other parallels between the Chiyou-Huangdi
    myth and the Kronos-Zeus myth (where Zeus attacks Kronos).

    While most Sinologists believe the Huangdi myth only appeared in China during the Warring States period (475-221 BC), which is late, there is some textual evidence that Huangdi (and presumably Chiyou/Zeus) appeared much earlier, perhaps in Mycenaean times, as Lucas Christopoulos suggests.

  17. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 3:34 pm

    a couple things I guess since normal people are engaging…

    * In the Book of Songs, 'heaven' rhymes with *-in ish words like 'person', 'field', and 'thousand' kind of a lot. I'm sure there is some tendentious means of maintaining "-jəm" in early 'heaven' of course! That's how this works :D

    * the component "忝" doesn't even appear in remotely early writing, does it? It is um weird to insist over and over again on this basis that 'heaven' had *-m in Old Chinese.

    * so (speculative!) OC *xjəm 'heaven' > EMC tʰɛn, but uh also OC *xjəm 'heaven' > "intermediary" OC xəɲ > EMC *xɛn. Got it. Some might feel, if they thought the two "EMC" items might be related, that latter-day dialectal tʰɛn > hɛn was pretty simple and even kinda normal for Chinese (cf. say Taishanese hen1). But those would be normal people…

    [* speaking of which, modern Chinese language reflections of 'heaven' should of course be considered, but let's parenthetical this baby. Such material never, ever matters on the approaches/mindsets at issue here.]

    * "heaven~shame" may stand for the whole Button-flavored approach to OC, which I've characterized on here before: idea is to build a veritable jungle of raawwther unique-seeming mutually derived word pairs and sets in early Chinese which again and again seem to be paralleled in terms of semantics but somehow often yes also in terms of sound! in Indo-European!, how very peculiar!, but this is just a coincidence!, with the IE material simply supporting the plausibility of the Chinese suggestions in the most general! of terms!

    * Pulleyblank's gan/zhi papers are indeed pertinent here, but normies be forewarned: among the weirdest in the history of would-be-science, these begin from the assumption that the 22 Stems and Branches of early Chinese were an "alphabet" on some accounts (cough Button's/Mair's) related to the Phoenician and thus had systematic and necessarily different OC onsets (e.g., Pulleyblank 1979:32: ʔʲ/ʔʷ kʲ/kʷ tʲ/tʷ pʲ/pʷ hʲ/hʷ sʲ/sʷ ŋʲ/ŋʷ nʲ/nʷ mʲ/mʷ ɣʲ/ɣʷ lʲ/lʷ), which yes we state at the outset so as to work assbackwardly in the process contorting the phonological history of Chinese in truly ungodlike ways. Yes in Pulleyblank (1991:56) this includes xʲ > tʰ totally literally: "xʲ [= 1979 hʲ] fronted to a dental and gave tʰ."

    If you ask people but why would you make arguments like this given there is plenty of actual evidence to work with… response is be evasive & maintain plausible deniability / superficial normalcy to the extent possible. The horse feet peak out only for a moment now and then… and yikes they are ugly.

  18. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 5:27 pm

    @ Jonathan Smith

    * In the Book of Songs, 'heaven' rhymes with *-in ish words like 'person', 'field', and 'thousand' kind of a lot. I'm sure there is some tendentious means of maintaining "-jəm" in early 'heaven' of course!

    Yes, as *-əɲ from the palatalization of the coda in *-jəm. It should not be otherwise. That's a stage that the predecessor of 天 and 祆 would need to go through.

    The point is that these reconstructions are not discrete algebraic symbols.

    What matters is the articulatory salience of the feature of palatalization as part of the onset/medial or coda. It's phonetics and phonology for a living language, not algebra.

    Incidentally, the mention of "thousand" is ironic since it reconstructs with -m (as evinced by Mon lŋim). Same conditioning environment.

    * the component "忝" doesn't even appear in remotely early writing, does it? It is um weird to insist over and over again on this basis that 'heaven' had *-m in Old Chinese.

    You can find 忝 on p.608 of Axel Schuessler's "Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese".

    idea is to build a veritable jungle of raawwther unique-seeming mutually derived word pairs and sets in early Chinese which again and again seem to be paralleled in terms of semantics but somehow often yes also in terms of sound! in Indo-European!, how very peculiar!, but this is just a coincidence!,

    Not word pairs, but word families.

    And absolutely not in terms of sound at all!

    I have never suggested any common origin for Proto-Indo-European and Old Chinese! I think what Pulleyblank is hitting on there is structural commonalities rather than common origins.

    the assumption that the 22 Stems and Branches of early Chinese were an "alphabet" on some accounts (cough Button's/Mair's) related to the Phoenician

    I do absolutely believe they represented the onsets.

    I most certainly do not believe they are necessarily related to Phoenician. When I made a post on LLog a while back about proposals about that, I explicitly noted that any such correlations to be "highly speculative". I recall you getting all het up then too.

    Pulleyblank's gan/zhi papers are indeed pertinent here

    天 is not one of the ganzhi. Pulleyblank's discussion of it happens to occur in his 1995 paper that focuses on the ganzhi.

    Have you even seen his 1995 emendation?

    Personally, I think Pulleyblank's 1983 proposals in Gordon Whittaker's book are his best ones. They are much closer to my proposals than his 1995 ones.

    Have you seen his 1983 proposals?

    Yes in Pulleyblank (1991:56) this includes xʲ > tʰ totally literally: "xʲ [= 1979 hʲ] fronted to a dental and gave tʰ."

    Please see David Marjanović's second comment above.

    The idea (now adopted by many) that ɬ- (or something like "hl-") was the onset for 天 rather than tʰ- goes back to Pulleyblank. He then tweaked it under a very specific conditioning environment (it's actually x-j- in 1995 rather than his 1991 xʲ-).

  19. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 5:54 pm

    Just to add:

    Pre-OC -jəŋ and -jən both completely merged as the Shijing rhyme *-əɲ (a merger reflected in most reconstructions), while *-jəm only merged with them as -əɲ under a specific conditioning environment (a merger not reflected in most reconstructions)

  20. Martin Schwartz said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 10:37 pm

    Re Lucas Christopoulos (and Katrarina's) citation of Myc. di-wo:
    Let us recall that the Mycenean civilization collaped cataclysmically ca.
    1050 BCE. Any transmission of the written form (which is LC's admitted focus) to the East would have taken place by then. Again, I repeat thar
    Myc. di-wo (which stands for /diwós/, with the usual non-representation
    of /s/ at the end of syllables) would mean 'of Zeus' and not 'Zeus'
    (homophonously it could represent the -ó- adjective of the word for 'sky',
    as per David Marjanović,but that doe not apply here), Now, the article
    linked by LC as evidence for putative Myc._Chin contacts speaks of tin
    ingots. Our Myc. inscriptions hitheto occur only on clay objects.
    IF there were tin or bronze objects with "of Zeus" which made their way westward–a humongously large IF–was there are Mycenean who
    would explain the inscription so interested easterners would know its meaning, and this would cause the "di" syllable
    alone to be the very early ancestor of the first part of the word
    refected in Middle Chinese(!) tiān–never mind the 2nd syll. or the
    Old Chinese phonic and (picto)graphic form of the word– to make an impression on Chinese culture……. ???……???. As for Katarina's
    Chiyou (Gesundheit!) and his wind and rain being Zeus, that's a wholly different matter in itself, without Myceneans being dragged in.
    Hmm, whatever happened to the Zoroastrrian aspect of the question?
    Martin Schwartz

  21. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 11:41 pm

    For the question of *Diwo, what surprised me is the similarity of the characters used in Mycenean and Chinese, no more than that. The Chinese character 天 is old, so the connection in writing should be looked at during the bronze age if there is a connection.

    Now for Chiyou that is another question that I have looked at in: (Early combat sports in China and the rise of professionalism (475 BC-220 AD) Nikephoros: Zeitschrift fur Sport und Kultur im Altertum; Graz University, Austria. n.23 (2010)). The horned god Chiyou was perhaps an early reference to the Mesopotamian gods (The Sumerian mother-goddess Ninhursag and Inanna, the goddess of war, are also often depicted wearing a horned head-dress). But then later during the Qin-Han Chiyou became closely associated with…Alexander-(Zeus). His armies wore red dresses, and he was the one who brought the large crossbow (danu) and long spears (Ji) to China, he was also the founder of wrestling competitions Juedi (角抵). His armies were eating sand and pebbles (coming from the desert) and they had “bronze throats” and “iron heads” (Greco-Macedonian Phrygian-style high helmets). Here is the most representative description of Chiyou:

    "During the Qin-Han times, they said that … Chiyou had hair on his temples like swords and spears, and horns on his head. He fought with Xuanyuan (軒轅) using Juedi and nobody could beat him. Today in the province of Ji (Jizhou 冀州), Chiyou festivities are held with two or three people together. They wear ox horns on their heads and wrestle (Xiangdi 相觝). The festivities of Juedi (角抵) were established by the Han (dynasty) and have been transmitted from that time."

    Han Wei Congshu; [Collection of Han and Wei Dynasties books] 漢魏叢書; shenyi jing [Unusual divine scripture] 神異經; book 2. (卷二) shuyiji [Commentary on unusual stories] 述異記. Ren Fang (任昉) Southern Dynasty of the Liang (南朝梁). 上海, Shanghai (1925).

  22. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 11:47 pm

    sorry, Chiyou armies had "bronze heads" and "Iron necks" not the opposite

    並獸身人語銅頭鐵額,食沙石子,造立兵杖刀戟大弩, 威振天下,誅殺無道, 不慈仁

  23. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 11:55 pm

    @ Martin Schwartz

    whatever happened to the Zoroastrrian aspect of the question?

    That's what 祆 is used for.

    @ Jonathan Smith

    It it helps, try to think of it like this:

    天 tʰian ← tʰɛn ← ɬəɲ ← xjəm

    Medial -j- regularly palatalizes the coda in a "Type A" syllable with schwa while also allowing xj- to merge with ɬ- in the same environment (otherwise it gives x- in Type A or ɕ- in Type B).

    祆 xian ← xɛn ← xəɲ← xjᵊm

    Medial -j- regularly palatalizes the coda in a type "A" syllable with schwa while also disappearing since medial -j- cannot co-occur with the palatal codas -j/-c/-ɲ (which result from the combination of medial -j- with certain codas)

    So, two regular evolutions, albeit with slightly different evolutionary paths.

  24. Chris Button said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 11:56 pm

    天 tʰian ← tʰɛn ← ɬəɲ ← xjəm
    祆 xian ← xɛn ← xəɲ ← xjəm

  25. Martin Schwartz said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 12:31 am

    @Lucas Christopoulos: I see there's no point arguing further with you against any Sinological relevance of Myc. di-wo.
    As for what you say on Chiyou, I'm reminded (no more than that)
    of Quranic Dhū-l Qarnayn "He of the 2 horns (?)' as possibly connected
    with Alexander (~Ammon/Zeus
    Martin Schwartz

  26. Martin Schwartz said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 12:32 am

    @Lucas Christopoulos: I see there's no point arguing further with you against any Sinological relevance of Myc. di-wo.
    As for what you say on Chiyou, I'm reminded (no more than that)
    of Quranic Dhū-l Qarnayn "He of the 2 horns (?)' as possibly connected
    with Alexander (~Ammon/Zeus).
    Martin Schwartz

  27. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 1:35 am

    @Martin Schwartz
    Concerning the evidence of the Bronze Age contacts between the Mediterranean and China, it is more difficult because sources are few. For the "Horned one," and his successor's contacts with China, there is "much more than that…"

  28. katarina said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 6:16 am

    RE Chiyou and Zeus:

    Chiyou did not have horns in the earliest text on him in the Shan Hai Jing ("Classic of Mountains and Seas"). Mythical figures can be elaborated on as time goes by. The Cinderella story which traveled from China to Europe got elaborated in Europe. The Yellow Emperor acquired a lot of attributes that weren't in the original myth.

    Chiyou is the modern Mandarin pronunciation of 蚩尤。 An older
    pronunciation is "tsiyou" or "tsyou" (rhyming with "below"), which still exists in the speech of Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, etc.

    "Tsyou" is similar in sound to Proto-Hellenic "dzeu"- in Dzeus (> Zeus).

    The vocative of Zeus is Ζεῦ. I suspect the vocative of Dzeus is Dzeu, similar to Chinese Tsyou "sky god of wind and rain", and Tsyou would be the Chinese vocative.

    In the Iliad, prayers to Zeus begin with the vocative form
    "Zeu pater", "o father Zeus". Latin "Jupiter" could have derived from this vocative form.

    Chiyou "Tsyou" could be the Chinese version of Proto-Hellenic vocative "Dzeu".

    However if we go with the Old Chinese sound of Chiyou
    *tjewa , it could be the Chinese version of the
    vocative of Mycenean di-wo (genitive) /di-wos (nominative).

    So whether Chiyou appeared in China in Mycenean times or
    in 400-200 BC, the name corresponds to the vocative of the Greek name.

  29. katarina said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 4:10 pm

    The American Heritage Dictionary, "Zeus": (Zeu pater = Jupiter ):

    " In the Iliad, prayers to Zeus begin with the vocative form Zeu pater, "o father Zeus….. the Romans, called the head of their pantheon Iūpiter or Iuppiter—Jupiter. The -piter part of his name is just a reduced form of pater, "father," and Iū- corresponds to the Zeu in Greek: Iūpiter is therefore precisely equivalent to Zeu pater "

    A vocative form , "Zeu pater", became Jupiter, a nominative.

    Thus nominative 蚩尤 Chiyou could originally have been a vocative.

  30. Chris Button said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 9:26 pm

    I'm interested that the first instance of 忝 in Schuessler's "Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese" is the following:

    忝帝位 "I would disgrace the god's high position"

    @ katarina

    For what it's worth, I would reconstruct 蚩 with a velar component as ᵏɬ-

  31. katarina said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 11:36 pm

    Thank you, Chris. I followed Zheng-Zhang Shangfang's reconstruction. Unfortunately 蚩 is not in Schuessler or Baxter&Sagart.

  32. Chris Button said,

    January 30, 2025 @ 12:31 am

    @ David Marjanović

    Oh, [xj] and [ɬ] merging makes sense

    You made me ponder on this a little more.

    Despite OC ɬ- and xj- before schwa merging as EMC tʰ- (type A syllable) or ɕ- (type B syllable), we don't necessarily have to assume that xj- became ɬ-. And indeed, that was my interpretation of Pulleyblank's position rather than Pulleyblank's explicit assertion.

    Aside from the shared EMC reflexes, the reason I interpreted it this way is because Pulleyblank (1995) shifts his 1991 reconstruction of 申 xʲ- and 辛 s- to 申 ɬ- and 辛 xʲ-.

    However, he notes that he had assumed that OC "must have had a sibilant *s-, which made *xʲ- the only possible candidate…" but "it is not universally true that all languages have sibilant initials." (As in much of his later work, the value of his discussion is in the phonological features rather than the actual reconstructed forms of the onsets, which do create a typologically curious system.)

    As for s- giving tʰ-, a well attested example comes from Northern Kuki-Chin tʰ-, which derives from Proto-Sino-Tibetan s- as the source of Old Chinese s-. And in coda position, a shift of -s to -t is attested in many languages across PST.

  33. Yves Rehbein said,

    January 30, 2025 @ 6:09 pm

    Every time this topic comes up it lives in my head rent free for a few days. Now I accidentally read that Proto-Germanic *skamō "shame" is no longer believed to be from Proto-Indo-European *k̂em-.

    I wondered if Lühr's theory explaining Germanic p from *(s)p could be supported by the same effect with other consonants. In the case of sky or heaven I could not think of any similar word from the top of my head. However, I have noticed angle, hook, or Anger, Hang, and it's not clear at all what PIE *(s)H would become. In the case of *h2 /*x/ it would probably merge with PIE *k into PG *x or get lost. To the extent that this suggests asgard, Æsir "god" < *ansuz < *h2ems-, it is neatly paralleled by Samstag "Saturday", day of Saturn, sabbath, shabbat, Sunday, *s(o)h2w-l/n- "Sol" or there abouts, not reconstructable for PIE.

    The theory stops making sense at this point, certainly not the point I was trying to make, indefensible as it is inexplicable.

    The most relevant question in this thread raised by Mr. Smith was about the rhymes in the Book of Songs. "Person" (rén?) is complicated by the fact that 天 (tiān) is interpreted as a human figure. "Field" (tián) receives visual confirmation from Sumerian ŠA "middle" in ašag "field", once attested ša₃-ŋa₂, Old Babylonian https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/epsd2/sux?xis=sux.r0056d2&ref=P344926.119 where Emegir ŋ regularly corresponds to Emesal m, Neo-Babylonian ŠA resembles Ugaritic l vis-à-vis OC /*lˤiŋ/ "field; to hunt" (B & S), whereas a-šag₄ can be safely interpreted in terms of A "water", whereas AŠAG, GANA probably represents the original glyph, from which our H can be easily derived, argued separately by Chiara Bozzone (2013, Initial Yod) to derive via Phoenician heth [ħ] rather than he [h] – an often mentioned problem in the literature.

    In the case of *h₁éḱwos "horse" I am thinking of German Schimmel "white horse", not attested before the 14th century when the Hanse comes into play, derived ostensibly from Schimmel "mold, mildew". Weißer Schimmel is bahuvrihi for "pleonasm" so the earliest evidence of "dat scymelinghe perd", "ein schemeliges perd" might work as figura etymologica. Old High German skim(b)al is not online in EWAhd yet, try EWNl https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/schimmel2 I followed skamal, skamên, skama, skamō instead. The answer is "uncertain" in both cases. Under skema, which serves as a theoretical basis for skimbal, the regular correspondances are accompanied by a note, "The problem in semantics, that the words meaning 'shimmer, glare' and 'night, shadow' can be derived from the same root is rarely mentioned in the literature" (EWAhd vol. 8, in German), which is confusing because the comparanda do not give "night". Skama does: Sami skápmu "dawn", skábma "polar night" with reference to Bjorvand & Lindeman, Våre arveord: Etymologisk ordbok https://ewa.saw-leipzig.de/articles/skama/de Latin caballus comes to mind, "[…] perhaps ultimately an Asiatic borrowing or Wanderwort," https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caballus#Latin We have a recent saying, Das Glück der Erde liegt auf dem Rücken der Erde, which contrast earth with horse-back.

    Equating the horse's back with a blanket term for sky in a rhyme on Schimmel I refer you to O.D.B, Shimmy Shimmy, Ya, , compare chemise, as I have a rant in store inspired for no good reason at all by the topic of phoshime https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shimmy The frequency illusion is aweful like that.

  34. Yves Rehbein said,

    January 30, 2025 @ 6:13 pm

    Correction: Das Glück der Erde liegt auf dem Rücken der Pferde

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