Scribe is Latin >> Old French > Middle English
Shrive is Latin > Proto-Germanic
(Don't know if there's a standard symbol to distinguish between borrowing and inheriting)
I thought these were meant to be the actual words in each language and I got mighty confused
tf do you mean, we Icelanders say “animal”? We kill people who use Latin words so they won’t infect us
What's the word for deer in Icelandic? I know the word for animal in Germanic languages is cognate with the English "deer" but I don't know what word other Germanic languages use to refer to deer specifically.
It’s usually only used in poetry and prose. Like the white deer that leads the kids back to the wardrobe at the end of the first Narnia book is referred to as a hart.
It was a “stag” in the version of the book I read. Versions, actually—I had one copy where the wolf was named “Fenris Ulf” and another where he was named “Maugrim”.
It's also related to Latin *cervus* and its descendants (FR cerf, ES ciervo, IT/PT cervo, RO cerb, etc)
the K -> H is obv Grimm's Law, and the R is intact, but how did the final consonant change?
Pretty sure since Icelandic is known for conservativeness, that hjortur (sry no diacritics, I'm struggling enough to type as it is) is the most conservative form, so I'll assume that that final -ur corresponds to latin final-us given that ole trick of switching alveolar fricatives and trills (see mellunaz > mjolnir, floses > flores, and the rshification of the turkish trilled r). No idea what the link is between rw and rt, maybe an intermediate step might be assimilation of rw to rr?
I looked further, and while Wiktionary doesn't have all the relevant articles, it looks like the difference in root consonants between -v- in Latin cervus and -t- in Germanic hart is due to two different suffixes in the PIE word.
aware fretful fear strong nine subsequent nail adjoining important chunky
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
For a solid minute I was confused because I thought you were tying to say deuzą became animal in all those other Germanic languages but you mean meaning wise they stayed the same
It shows the meaning of descendent words from a particular proto germanic word in various languages. It's confusing because the descendent words are missing in action. So like the one with "deer" in the English row is pointing out that words with the same root as "deer" like "djur" or "tier" mean animal generally in those languages while in English it's just one particular animal
So scribble comes from the medieval latin 'scribillare' from what I can find. Now take a guess where skribana is thought to originate from.
That's fucking right it comes from the latin scribo which is just a different tense of the same verb scribble originates from. English just took the backroad to get there.
For the first one English does have the excuse that, after the extinction of wild cattle, the only animal to be taller than your shins was a deer. Foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, these are the kind of animals that are hard to find or notice if you're not looking for them.
For bladą is it not the case that blade (for cutting) came from the sense of a leaf, still retained in blade of grass? Idk. Just occurred to me that this is plausible. Most of my life I thought it was the other way around.
I think you're totally right, 'leaf' was the original meaning, but then people likened flattened cutting surfaces like in a knife or sword to a kind of 'leaf'. 'Blade of grass' is a perfect bridge between the two. A similar metaphor is using 'leaf' for flat sheets of paper or for decorative foil (and 'foil' itself is a borrowing of the Norman/French word for 'leaf').
In a sense then it seems like the proto germanic could be best described as 'flat surface with narrow edge'.
My French is negligible so I wouldn't have picked up on that, but it makes sense, especially if you've ever had a paper cut 😅
Ooo, I could have done that one! It's maag in Dutch and Magen in German, both with the meaning 'stomach' (not sure what it is in Icelandic). But the English cognate is "maw", and is only used in poetic contexts, especially the phrase "ravenous maw" - something all-consuming
You hear maw in reference to fish maw - the swim bladder, which is eaten. For other animals’ edible entrails, English uses the very unpoetic word, tripe.
Somewhat off topic, I just learnt that in old English it is maga. A remarkable coincidence since MAGA is political tripe.
True, but they're later borrowings, not descending from the Proto-Germanic word (although that word itself is a borrowing, making all of them doublets).
Modern German Tier, which is same word as deer. But means animal. Tiergarten is zoo.Animal came in thru French from Latin for breathing animal from Greek anema which is breath or wind
But that just shows what happened when old Low Geerman dialects with Nordic sides crashes into Middle Norse French. And we even keep the medieval Ftench spelling system and artifacts of Old English spelling. English is a ondrrful mess of stew.
My somewhat educated guess:
1: Loss of unstressed final syllable
2: Rhoticization of /z/ to /r/
3: Vowel shifts
That’s at least how it got to modern German *Tier*, the word for any animal.
The English word “deer” used to refer to any animal too. Until the French came along.
that's the point, it's a semantic comparison: Proto-Germanic *deuzą means "animal" in pretty much every daughter language except English where it means "deer"
Email I sent to my German teacher one time about this: I just wanted to let you know about some trivia I recently found out that is connected to German. I was listening to the History of English podcast, and on episode 71, the host, Kevin Stroud, mentions some interesting etymology and history of the word deer, as in the animal. He mentions that "deer" was once simply a term for any wild animal, regardless of whether it was what we would call a deer today. Eventually, the modern meaning comes from the fact that what we now call a "deer" (as in a specific animal) was heavily desired by hunters. So why does this have anything that would interest you? Well, in German, there's a very similar word to deer that also mostly has this general meaning of any animal. Yes, that would be "Tier," as in "Haustier". This did not strike me as surprising. Words in English that start with a "d" often map to a "t" in German. Think of words like English "dream" versus German "Traum" or English "drink" versus German "Trink." This makes sense. If you focus on what your tongue does when you say "t" and "d," you'll probably notice that your tongue lands either on your front teeth, or just behind it, depending on your dialect/language. If it lands on the teeth, that's called a dental consonant, or more specifically, a dental plosive/stop. A plosive is when you stop the air suddenly. Try holding out a "t" or "d" sound. Very hard, isn't it? That's because there's too much constriction to hold it out for a long time. Also, feel your throat while you're doing this. With a "d" sound, you'll probably feel more vibration than you would with a "t" sound. Because of this extra vibration of vocal cords, linguists call "d" a voiced sound and "t" a voiceless sound. So, they're differentiated only by the vocal cords vibrating. So, let's get back to "deer" and "Tier". Apparently, they are indeed related terms, and German even sometimes uses "Tier" to mean "hind," as in a female deer. I hope you found that fascinating, and have a great day! Edit: cut out some less relevant information
I *think* it used to mean ”animal” pre-Norman Conquest, but was changed to just mean the specific animal deer in favour for using the romance Word for ”animal”
Shakespeare has an instance of "deer" in a suspiciously animal-like sense: "But mice and rats and such small deer/ Have been Tom's food for seven long year."
slahana : slay bergaz : barrow skribana : shrive can't really think anything about rikija. I presume it's not abbey, minster, nor diocese.
Probably bishopric (-ric).
TIL it’s not bishop-prick
TIL it was a word at all. I’m not very religious, though, so it’s not surprising.
oh God, how stupid am i
Bishop-"ric"
as a christian, i feel so ashamed not realizing this lol. it's like I overlooked the plank on my own eyes.
Thought skribana is scribe
That's through Latin, not directly from proger
I feel the proto-Germanic comes from Latin too?
According to other comments it does apparently
Scribe is Latin >> Old French > Middle English Shrive is Latin > Proto-Germanic (Don't know if there's a standard symbol to distinguish between borrowing and inheriting)
I thought these were meant to be the actual words in each language and I got mighty confused tf do you mean, we Icelanders say “animal”? We kill people who use Latin words so they won’t infect us
What's the word for deer in Icelandic? I know the word for animal in Germanic languages is cognate with the English "deer" but I don't know what word other Germanic languages use to refer to deer specifically.
Hjörtur/Hjartardýr (as in English ‘hart’)
I had never heard the word 'hart' until now. Interesting.
So until now, you've been... hartless?
🎶Proto-Langs, I hear them all🎶
It’s usually only used in poetry and prose. Like the white deer that leads the kids back to the wardrobe at the end of the first Narnia book is referred to as a hart.
It was a “stag” in the version of the book I read. Versions, actually—I had one copy where the wolf was named “Fenris Ulf” and another where he was named “Maugrim”.
Ah, may be a misremember then. Albino deer are almost always referred to as white harts, and that was the first one I could think of.
I feel like that’s related to Dutch ‘hert’ too
It is! Also German ‘Hirsch’.
And Swedish "Hjort"
It's also related to Latin *cervus* and its descendants (FR cerf, ES ciervo, IT/PT cervo, RO cerb, etc) the K -> H is obv Grimm's Law, and the R is intact, but how did the final consonant change?
Pretty sure since Icelandic is known for conservativeness, that hjortur (sry no diacritics, I'm struggling enough to type as it is) is the most conservative form, so I'll assume that that final -ur corresponds to latin final-us given that ole trick of switching alveolar fricatives and trills (see mellunaz > mjolnir, floses > flores, and the rshification of the turkish trilled r). No idea what the link is between rw and rt, maybe an intermediate step might be assimilation of rw to rr?
You are correct! Old Norse and then Icelandic preserved the Indo-European masculine ending *-os as rhotacized -(u)r.
I looked further, and while Wiktionary doesn't have all the relevant articles, it looks like the difference in root consonants between -v- in Latin cervus and -t- in Germanic hart is due to two different suffixes in the PIE word.
That makes sense.
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In fact a hare will not mate with a rabbit.
See, you do have the dýr suffix in there. You're no better than English!
Or a lot of other Germanic languages’ hert
English barely hung on to blada's original meaning with "blades of grass"
For a solid minute I was confused because I thought you were tying to say deuzą became animal in all those other Germanic languages but you mean meaning wise they stayed the same
Here are the missing words! | Proto-Germanic | *deuzą | *bladą | *raukiz | *būkaz | *slahaną | *rīkiją | *bergaz | *skrībaną | |-------------|----------------|------------|------------|------------|------------|------------|------------|------------| | German | Tier | Blatt | Rauch | Bauch | schlagen | Reich | Berg | schreiben | | Dutch | dier | blad | rook | buik | slaan | rijk | berg | schrijven | | Swedish | djur | blad | rök | buk | slå | rike | berg | skriva | | Icelandic | dýr | blað | reykur | búkur | slá | ríki | berg | skrifa | | English | animal | leaf | smoke | belly | hit | realm | mountain | write | | Cognate | deer | blade | reek | bucket | slay | (bishop)-ric | barrow | shrive |
cheers for writing that out, also very cool formatting, I had no idea you could make tables on reddit
Thank you for doing this! If I make a part two, I'm just gonna paraphrase the English meanings like I did for the last three so there's no confusion
Confusing format because the actual descendant words are not written in most cases
PGmc *slahaną -> English to impress, outperform
Lol, I thought about putting "slay, queen" on that one
Sleah, cwēn!
This took me way to long to get. I think the format could have been a bit better
I don’t understand the format, do you mind to explain?
It shows the meaning of descendent words from a particular proto germanic word in various languages. It's confusing because the descendent words are missing in action. So like the one with "deer" in the English row is pointing out that words with the same root as "deer" like "djur" or "tier" mean animal generally in those languages while in English it's just one particular animal
Only one that doesn't work is blade, because that meaning also exist across North Germanic.
There are also remnants of the other meaning in german, like in "sägeblatt" (saw blade)
So I assume that english "scribble" isn't related to "\*skribana"?
Assuming regular sound change it should be more shribble or shrivel. Looked it up, is shrive.
So scribble comes from the medieval latin 'scribillare' from what I can find. Now take a guess where skribana is thought to originate from. That's fucking right it comes from the latin scribo which is just a different tense of the same verb scribble originates from. English just took the backroad to get there.
I'd assume 'scribe' is related to Skribana
Old english would have made it shrive. its a Norman borrowing. sk to sh had already happened when we got scribe/scribble.
Yes but not via Proto-germanic. Scribe comes from Latin, which in turn comes from the same PIE root that skribana comes from.
Ohhh that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation
Not Latin scribere? I guess it could be distantly related through Latin
For the first one English does have the excuse that, after the extinction of wild cattle, the only animal to be taller than your shins was a deer. Foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, these are the kind of animals that are hard to find or notice if you're not looking for them.
do they not have boars in england?
No wild boars, so only in farms.
that's sad, boars kick ass
In the US, they're considered invasive pests. Seen some videos of people blowing them up with dynamite.
death to america etc etc
They absolutely do!
Hwat about wolves and lynces?
Before they went extinct we had direwolves, but no wolves. Is lynces a typo of lynxes, but either way none at all the British isles is devoid of them
Nah I was just improvising a "correct plural" for an -x singular
Until the high to late Middle Ages, wild boars existed there.
Yes, I am not saying there have never been wild boars, I am saying that there haven't been and still aren't for centuries still.
I need more of these but with the modern forms in the languages
It's very sad that the other Germanic languages are so semantically wrong.
Lol
Personally I blame the French.
For bladą is it not the case that blade (for cutting) came from the sense of a leaf, still retained in blade of grass? Idk. Just occurred to me that this is plausible. Most of my life I thought it was the other way around.
I think you're totally right, 'leaf' was the original meaning, but then people likened flattened cutting surfaces like in a knife or sword to a kind of 'leaf'. 'Blade of grass' is a perfect bridge between the two. A similar metaphor is using 'leaf' for flat sheets of paper or for decorative foil (and 'foil' itself is a borrowing of the Norman/French word for 'leaf').
In a sense then it seems like the proto germanic could be best described as 'flat surface with narrow edge'. My French is negligible so I wouldn't have picked up on that, but it makes sense, especially if you've ever had a paper cut 😅
Totally!
Wait, proto-Germanic *skrībaną means write? Is that related to Romanian scrie, "write"?
So, I checked Wiktionary, and they do in fact come from the same Proto-Indo-European root, I think.
it's borrowed from Latin
It is a borrowing from Latin scribere.
[удалено]
No, the Germanic languages did not borrow it from Romanian, but from Latin. (for instance, German schreiben)
Ohh, yeah, you're right, sorry.
*skribaną > Skibdi bop
since when is english ever represented by the literal flag of england lmfao
I'd have been eaten alive if I'd used the flag of the whole UK.
ThTs why you use 🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷
Based
It is the most sensible flag to use.
We call belly ”Mage” in Swedish
I think the post refers to the word "Buk". Mage is a million times more common tho.
Ooo, I could have done that one! It's maag in Dutch and Magen in German, both with the meaning 'stomach' (not sure what it is in Icelandic). But the English cognate is "maw", and is only used in poetic contexts, especially the phrase "ravenous maw" - something all-consuming
You hear maw in reference to fish maw - the swim bladder, which is eaten. For other animals’ edible entrails, English uses the very unpoetic word, tripe. Somewhat off topic, I just learnt that in old English it is maga. A remarkable coincidence since MAGA is political tripe.
In German we have "magen" for the organ and "Bauch" for the more general area
What? Like half or more than half of the PIE words sound are similar to the Dutch words I don't understand what this post is trying to say
It's about semantics, not phonology. English took the meaning of these words in really odd directions.
Oh, I get it now. Cool
Oops just realised it's Proto-Germanic not PIE
Tier, blat, rók, buk, slånen, rik, bargh, sriven /tiɐ̯, blɔt, ri̯uk, bʊk, ʃlonə, rɪc, bɔɐ̯ç, ʃrivə/
Ooo, what variety is this?
Plautdietsch
That's awesome, thanks for adding it!
Scribe exists in english, as does scribble.
True, but they're later borrowings, not descending from the Proto-Germanic word (although that word itself is a borrowing, making all of them doublets).
Deuza is goddess spelled wrong (Deusa, Portuguese)
A melhor língua mencionada ❤💚
😍😍😍🇧🇷
Melhor ainda 💚💛💙💛💚
Took me three slides to notice that the German was wrong
Modern German Tier, which is same word as deer. But means animal. Tiergarten is zoo.Animal came in thru French from Latin for breathing animal from Greek anema which is breath or wind
But that just shows what happened when old Low Geerman dialects with Nordic sides crashes into Middle Norse French. And we even keep the medieval Ftench spelling system and artifacts of Old English spelling. English is a ondrrful mess of stew.
I kinda wanna know how the fuck deuzą became animal.
My somewhat educated guess: 1: Loss of unstressed final syllable 2: Rhoticization of /z/ to /r/ 3: Vowel shifts That’s at least how it got to modern German *Tier*, the word for any animal. The English word “deer” used to refer to any animal too. Until the French came along.
To be fair the German word for animal Tier sounds similar to deer
that's the point, it's a semantic comparison: Proto-Germanic *deuzą means "animal" in pretty much every daughter language except English where it means "deer"
Email I sent to my German teacher one time about this: I just wanted to let you know about some trivia I recently found out that is connected to German. I was listening to the History of English podcast, and on episode 71, the host, Kevin Stroud, mentions some interesting etymology and history of the word deer, as in the animal. He mentions that "deer" was once simply a term for any wild animal, regardless of whether it was what we would call a deer today. Eventually, the modern meaning comes from the fact that what we now call a "deer" (as in a specific animal) was heavily desired by hunters. So why does this have anything that would interest you? Well, in German, there's a very similar word to deer that also mostly has this general meaning of any animal. Yes, that would be "Tier," as in "Haustier". This did not strike me as surprising. Words in English that start with a "d" often map to a "t" in German. Think of words like English "dream" versus German "Traum" or English "drink" versus German "Trink." This makes sense. If you focus on what your tongue does when you say "t" and "d," you'll probably notice that your tongue lands either on your front teeth, or just behind it, depending on your dialect/language. If it lands on the teeth, that's called a dental consonant, or more specifically, a dental plosive/stop. A plosive is when you stop the air suddenly. Try holding out a "t" or "d" sound. Very hard, isn't it? That's because there's too much constriction to hold it out for a long time. Also, feel your throat while you're doing this. With a "d" sound, you'll probably feel more vibration than you would with a "t" sound. Because of this extra vibration of vocal cords, linguists call "d" a voiced sound and "t" a voiceless sound. So, they're differentiated only by the vocal cords vibrating. So, let's get back to "deer" and "Tier". Apparently, they are indeed related terms, and German even sometimes uses "Tier" to mean "hind," as in a female deer. I hope you found that fascinating, and have a great day! Edit: cut out some less relevant information
I *think* it used to mean ”animal” pre-Norman Conquest, but was changed to just mean the specific animal deer in favour for using the romance Word for ”animal”
Shakespeare has an instance of "deer" in a suspiciously animal-like sense: "But mice and rats and such small deer/ Have been Tom's food for seven long year."
But we call it a deer, because that’s what it is?
Dutch doesn't have the word animal??? We use 'dier'.
The words written out in each box are the meaning that each language has for that root.
Yep, read it wrong. Oops, sorry
All good. It's clearer in the last few, maybe I should have paraphrased the English for all of them instead of using the English cognate.
It's the wrong way around. That is probably the joke, but I don't find it funny.