tenebrae

Adyates over at De Grypis blog has a post (link) about the etymology of Latin tenebrae. It’s an extended comment on Chris Jones’ post at the LatinLaguage.us blog (link). Let’s see what some of the authorities have to say.

Alois Walde offers this (in the 2nd edition of Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch): “Lat. tenebrae zunächst aus *temefrā (*temafrā) durch Dissimilation von m gegen folgenden Labial (Niedermann BB.XXV, 87, Contrib. à la crit. de gloses lat. 31)”.

Ernout & Meillet (in their Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: Histoire des mots): “Lat. tenebrae repose sur *temə-s-rā-; le passage de -m- à -n- fait difficulté; car il suppose l’intervention d’une forme où la voyelle de syllable intérieure était syncopée, à moins qu’on n’admette une dissimilation, tout hypothétique, de m en n par la labiale *f, d’où est sorti b; on ne peut restituer le détail des faits”.

Tucker (in his A Concise Etymological Dictionary of Latin 1931): “Possibly *temsrā > *tensrā & anaptyxis occured (v. umerus). [It is not, however, entirely out of the question to suppose a compound t-enebh- (cf. nebula, νεφος), similar to δ-νοφος, κ-νεφας]”. But, Chaintraine (in his Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) discusses these two Greek words: “Fait penser à la fois à ζοφος, à κνεφας : les mots de ce genre se prêtent à prendre des formes variées par une tabou linguistique. Tout effort pour préciser (croisements des mots, etc. ?) est malaisé, v. Güntert, Reimwortbildungen 112 sq., Petersen, Am. J. Ph. 56, 1935, 57 sqq.”.

Finally, Mallory & Adams (in their Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture) reconstruct the PIE root tómh_xes- ‘dark’ with an unknown laryngeal.

black and white and blue all over

All the following words ultimately go back to PIE *bhel- ‘bright, shine, gleam, glitter; white’ English black, blank (French blanc ‘white’), blanch, blanket, bleach, blue (> *bhlē-wo-), flame, and flagrant; Old English blǣco ‘paleness, leprosy’, Latin flāvus ‘yellow, yellow-red, blond, red, golden’ (> *bhl̥ə-wo-). See IEW bhel- 118ff., bheleg- ‘shining’ 124, & bhleu-k- ‘burning’ 159. That’s quite a semantic spread there.

golden yellow

Goofy’s entry on the etymology of mildew (originally it meant honeydew, as in the secretions of aphids) got me to thinking about the three different PIE roots that give us the reflexes of honey in modern IE languages: *melit- ‘honey’, *médhu- ‘honey; mead’, and *k_enǝkó ‘honey yellow, golden yellow’ (IEW 723f., 707, & 564f.). For some reason, the word for honey got replaced in the Germanic languages (save for Gothic miliþ) with a color word. The same sort of thing happened for the word for bear: Germanic has replaced the word for bear with one for brown, while Latin keeps ursus, Greek αρκτος (arktos), and Welsh arth from PIE *r̥k̑þos (875) while Slavic is satisfied with medved, literally ‘honey-eater’.

nach dem fall

Wittgenstein once famously wrote: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. (The world is everything that is the case.) English case is ultimately from Latin casus, literally ‘fallen’, is a form of the third conjugation verb cado (cadere, cecidi, casus), IEW 516 *k̑ad- ‘to fall’, Old Irish casar ‘hail, lightning’ (*k̑ad-tarā), pl. Welsh cesair ‘large hailstones’, Cornish keser, Breton kazerc’h ‘hail’. It is also the calque (or loan translation) chosen by Roman grammarians for the Greek grammatical term ptōsis ‘case’.

banian

I learned a new word in Udhagamandalam (or Ooty as everybody called it): banian. It’s what the British call a vest and we a t-shirt. The sleeveless kind which I have also heard called a wife-beater. The etymology offered in the OED1 is: “a. Pg. banian, probably a. Arab. banyān (16th c.), ad Gujarāti vāṇiyo man of the trading caste, ad. Skr. vaṇij merchant ‘The terminal nasal may be taken from the plural form vāṇiyan’ (Col. Yule)”. From its primary meaning of ‘a Hindoo trader, especially one from the province of Guzerat’ to its later meaning of ‘a loose gown, jacket, or shirt of flannel, worn in India’. And, it yields banyan tree, its fifth meaning. So, its meaning changed in India. It went from a kind of dressing gown to a sleeveless undershirt. The first a is pronounced as a short a or schwa, per its Hindi or Sanskrit value, in spite of its length in Gujarati.