Galvinic etymologies, was: Vote!

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001 23:24:52 -0500, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>I'm somewhat at a loss to understand the proliferation of forms for 1, in
>particular.  There are some interesting and apparently complex sound
>correspondences throughout.  But anyway......
Yep. All forms are produced quite regularly, and sound changes in each
dialect do differ from what happened in others.

But, funnily, the changes are actualy rather simple (for the Nadeian
standards, at any rate). I think they all were completed in 5-6 centuries.

And, still more important, they produce little additional homonymy (except
in E) and allow for preserving the weird Arabic word formation in all its
splendor. This was essential for my plans about using these Aulic langs
for lexifying other Nadeian tongues.

I was really surprised to find out that I can make Arabic sound so
different without destroying its structure.

<...>
>I am curious:  if these descend from Arabic, I see little or no resemblance
>to the Arabic names I'm familiar with from Indonesian, ahad, senin, selasa,
>rabo, kamis
ahad = 1b: 'aHad(un) in Proto-Galvinic. (H = pharyngeal h).
senin looks like a dialectal Arabic derivate of the same root as 2a and 2b:
PG 'iTnA:n(i), TintA:n(i)
selasa = PG TalA:Tat(un)
rabo = PG 'arba3at(un)
kamis = PG Xamsat(un) (X = uvular/back velar fricative)
It seems that Indonesian borrowed from a less archaic dialect (more distant
from modern literary Arabic). Besides, 4 and 5 in I. look like feminine
forms, without the ending -ah/-at(un).

All the PG forms above are (nearly) identical with modern literary Arabic
(since no 'emphatic' sounds occur in them).

As for proliferation - note that I cited *potential* forms; I don't think
all of them were used in PG.

1c and 1d were originally adjectives, 'single, sole': PG fard(un) and
toww(un).

1e - 1l are borrowings from Byzantine Greek or Late Middle Persian.
For example, 1e is PG jakk(un) < Persian _jak_; 1l is PG furA: 'one time'
< Greek _phora_. Meanings were often slightly altered compared to the
source lang already in PG.

2c is PG Zuft(un) 'a couple' < Pers. _dZuft_
2d is PG zibG(un) 'a couple' < Gr. _zeugon_

1000a is inherited from Arabic, PG 'alf(un).
1000b is PG hazA:r(un) < Pers.
1000c-f are various forms borrowed from Gr., all derived from _khilioi_.

My idea was that borrowings (and semantic shifts) were more probable for
1, 2, and big numbers. Cf. non-Germanic words in English: sole, single,
unique, solitary, individual, specimen, piece, item; couple, pair;
million, etc.


Basilius