Re: ach y fi (was: CHAT Starbucks (was: Hymn to Ikea etc.))

On Sat, 28 Feb 2004 22:13:06 -0500, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

> Michael Poxon wrote:
>
>> Yes it is /a:x@vi:/ or /a:xVvi:/ meaning something that you say when you
>> throw your hands up in despair. "Oh no!" "My goodness" or whatever.
>> Literally it's "Oh the me!"
>
> Very reminiscent of Spanish "¡Ay de mí!" and French? Italian? literary
> "ahimé" 'alas'.  Do other languages have such close correspondences? Did
> Latin, or might this be a Celticism???  Just _speculans_.
 From what I've seen in this thread, the pattern /aE_^x@Bi:/ (or something
like it) seems to be Romance, Germanic and Celtic, at the very least.
Maybe it's an older pattern that became folk-etymologised at or near the
Proto-Centum stage of PIE. I don't actually have a PC phoneme set to hand,
so I can't actually offer a clearer reconstruction. Is it potentially
Ibero-celtic, Etruscan, Basque, or some other non-IE European substrate
language? Uralic?

OTOH, maybe it's a case of convergent evolution, rather than divergent?
That might keep ol' wossname's razor happy.




Paul