Thread

Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek

196 points · 74 comments · axiologist

kleton · 1789709109 · focus · HN ↗
> because the Proto-Indo-European language arose in the landlocked steppes, it had no need for—and has no securely reconstructable word for—‘sea’.
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
1. TFNA · 1789709548 · focus · HN ↗
  There are decades of scholarship on those cognates, and a longstanding view that in Proto-Indo-European the word meant simply "large body of water" and not specifically "sea". Moreover, it may be a substrate word borrowed into European IE languages, as the affinity of that Sanskrit word to this cognate set is not very certain.
  1. kleton · 1789710635 · focus · HN ↗
    It is probably not a substrate word, but more likely coming from "dead" water, as in not a moving river.
    TFNA · 1789710878 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a well-established field where you can read experts discussing the word in depth, including its derivational properties and ablaut behavior. This isn't something where an HN's armchair guess is worth anything, just like when laypeople use HN threads on quantum theory for their own inane ideas.
    kleton · 1789712517 · focus · HN ↗
    Carl Darling Buck (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages) and Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch) are just a few of the philologists who have posited this "dead water" hypothesis
    TFNA · 1789715261 · focus · HN ↗
    Neither Buck nor Pokorny are regarded today as worth citing except for historiographical reasons. Their work is obsolete by many decades.
    derriz · 1789718782 · focus · HN ↗
    Could you recommend a book or reading material that reflects recent developments in PIE research? I have a few books but they’re quite old.
    Affric · 1789855279 · focus · HN ↗
    It's funny how you cited sources and rather than be given information you were just told that you were very wrong without any attempt to distill knowledge.
    TFNA · 1789926535 · focus · HN ↗
    For someone in the field, teaching is work, while telling people they are wrong isn't. Unless you are paying good money, you don't have a right to the former instead of the latter. In any event, the GP (note: not the same as the OP) could just look for himself on the shadow libraries, which now have pretty much everything.
    derriz · 1790056636 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn’t cite sources. You’re confusing me with someone else.
  2. medvidek · 1789710815 · focus · HN ↗
    You can see the same with the word "sea". Its German equivalent See still mainly means "lake", even though in some fixed expressions it can be translated as "sea" (e.g. Nordsee, Ostsee).
    Lutzb · 1789714530 · focus · HN ↗
    Der See - the lake
    Die See - the ocean
    Basje · 1789718665 · focus · HN ↗
    As a Dutch person, we were taught German in secondary school and Meer/See were the textbook example of false friends:
    het meer - der See - the lake
    de zee - das Meer - the sea
    I don't remember being taught "die See" but I also dropped my German course after one year (which I now regret). Anyway, I always thought this was an interesting development in our languages.
    samus · 1789749667 · focus · HN ↗
    "die See" refers to the sea in general, not to a specific body of water, unless it is part of a name, like "Nordsee".
    The English word "sea" is also sometimes used in this sense, but it's less apparent since "the" carries no gender: "He liked living close to the sea." - doesn't really refer to a specific sea or ocean even though the definite article has been used. (I'm happy to be corrected if this is an ungrammatical sentence since I'm not a native English speaker)
    niemandhier · 1789718917 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember reading that, in middlelow German the meanings were swapped “See” meaning the ocean and “Meer” meaning large body of standing water.
    That’s probably why the lake is called “Steinhuder Meer”.
    In low German the word for ocean still is “See”.
    nephihaha · 1789727500 · focus · HN ↗
    The word "mere" in English is pretty uncommon but tends to refer to small bodies of water.
    mr_toad · 1789733736 · focus · HN ↗
    There are dozens of lakes in England, and a few in other english speaking countries with the word mere in their name.
    nephihaha · 1789742281 · focus · HN ↗
    Hence I said "pretty uncommon'. Windermere is the most prominent example but is often called Lake Windermere. There is also Fowlmere nature reserve.
    Definitely not the most common name for inland bodies of water by a country mile though. "Pond", "pool", and "lake" are more common.
    saispas · 1789757746 · focus · HN ↗
    I read your post, and it got me thinking because, round here in Cheshire,v'mere' is a very common name for a bigger stretch of water ('pool' is generally reserved for smaller stretches of water).
    So I did a quick search to check, both from memory and by looking at the map – not because I doubted you being right in general across the UK, but because locally 'mere' is so common.
    Anyway, towns or bodies of water with 'Mere' in Cheshire: Mere, Mere Heath, Ellesmere Port, Blakemere, Delamere, Oakmere, Tatton Mere, Comber Mere, Pickmere, Manley Mere, Shakerly Mere, Marbury (means 'Fortified town by the lake'), Marbury Big Mere, the Quoisley Meres, Flaxmere, Hatchmere, Radnor Mere, Astbury Mere, Rossmere, Rostherne Mere, Nunsmere, The Mere, Little Mere… and then I got bored, so I may have missed a couple. Anyway, that's at least 23, and Cheshire is not a noticeably watery place, compared to some other counties.
    In contrast, there are very few lakes: I could find Oulton Park Lake (man-made in the late 18th Century), and Acre Nook Lake, Lapwing Hall Lake, and another unnamed one – a series of quarry pits turned into a watersports centre in the 2010s.
    So it looks like that in Cheshire at least, the normal name for a 'larger than a pond' body of water or nearby town is 'mere'.
    Thanks for sending me down this interesting (well, to me, anyway) rabbit hole…
    nephihaha · 1789804609 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know of a single "mere" in Scotland or Ireland. I doubt there are any in Wales... Maybe in the eastern bits that are less Welsh speaking. I'm surprised about Cheshire. Maybe it is more widespread than I thought it was! But it isn't a word I hear used in spoken in English outside of place names.
    Some of it is regional. "Tarn" turns up in the Danelaw. "Lough" turns up in the far north of England for about twenty place names, which is a variant of "loch", but is pronounced "luff". You can find some "loughs" near Hadrian's Wall.
    saispas · 1789821069 · focus · HN ↗
    You wouldn’t really expect many in Wales itself, because ‘mere’ is from the Old English. There are a few in Shropshire (including Ellesmere – the other end of the never-built Ellesmere canal on its way to Ellesmere Port) and there are some in the Fens and elsewhere. Apparently, there are a couple in Wales – near Wrexham and in Pembrokeshire. (I got this from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_(lake)…" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_(lake)…).
    I suspect there’s a Mercian link here somewhere…
    embedding-shape · 1789725113 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, my mother tongue is similar, "sea" and "ocean" has the exact same word, so of course when I speak English I accidentally call a bunch of seas for oceans instead.
  3. EdwardDiego · 1789714944 · focus · HN ↗
    Yep, it's the same in Māori, a Polynesian language, where "moana" refers to oceans and large lakes alike.
    What's really interesting is that in Hawaiian, a close relative with some sound shifts (k/t, l/r, n/ng, so taboo is kapu in Hawaiian, in Māori, tapu, path is ala / ara, the God of the sea is Kanaloa/Tangaroa) they have more than one word for ocean, kai is coastal waters, moana is the deep ocean.
    But it makes sense in the geographical context of both societies and how they evolved to their environment, the Hawaiian archipelago is made up of multiple smaller islands separated by waters exposed to the full force of the Pacific, while the archipelago of New Zealand is dominated by two large landmasses separated by a narrow strait that together are about the same area as Germany.
    So the Hawaiians remained more tightly wedded to the sea to build their archipelagan societies than the Māori did.
    In fact, the Māori lost the knowledge to build ocean-going vessels like the ones that had carried them to New Zealand within a few hundred years because there was no need for it. And their language lost the distinction between "coastal waters" and "ocean" while Hawaiian retained them.
    While we have evidence of Māori traveling to Raoul in the Kermadecs early on, as classical Māori culture evolved on much much larger islands, their technology focus on boats switched from ocean going vessels to coastal travel and river travel.
    In fact, while "Wai", water, is often considered the Māori word for "river", there's another word that also means river in Māori:
    "Ara" - path.
    (Of course, it still means a regular path)
    dmurray · 1789722098 · focus · HN ↗
    Are there any large lakes in Polynesia? The Māori, Hawaiians, etc are one group of people I would expect to make a distinction between lakes (puddles, really) and open ocean.
    nephihaha · 1789727431 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, there are many substantial ones in New Zealand. Lake Taupo is an obvious one, and there are some large ones in Otago and Southland which are not abutting the sea.
    I would imagine Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones, since they need to be able to drink. Even small islands can have pools.
    [Edit to add: much of Polynesia is of volcanic origin, so freshwater crater lakes are a feature of these landscapes.]
    EdwardDiego · 1789736011 · focus · HN ↗
    > Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones
    Māori distinguished water _quality_ without reference to whether or not it was a lake or sea or river.
    Wai tai: Salt water
    Wai māori: Fresh water, water for regular daily usage
    Waiora: Pure water that restored/healed a person
    Waikino: Dangerous / polluted water
    Waitapu: Sacred water
    Which makes sense right? You can have a river that is significantly salty and hence unpotable some distance from the sea, depending on the strength of the tides - likewise you can have a lake near the sea that intermingles with seawater to the extent that it's brackish.
    So Māori naming was more based on utility than the geographical distinctions than we're used to in the Eurocentric worldview.
    And this also extended to their view on land ownership, which caused so many issues when Europeans turned up and wanted to "buy" "land" from the local iwi/tribes - a chief would grant a European the exclusive rights to grazing in an area, and the European would interpret it as exclusive ownership, and then get angry when the Māori would continue harvesting tuna/eels or birds on "their" land that they'd "purchased".
    nephihaha · 1789754183 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not sure what you mean by "Eurocentric" here. These distinctions exist in most Asian languages and probably in other continental landmasses.
    Peoples living on remote oceanic islands are the exception rather than the rule, and lost the words for larger freshwater bodies because they didn't tend to encounter them, just as some inland peoples had no words for oceans. You've even mentioned a distinction... "brackish". It is pretty important to know if one can drink water or not.
    By the way, in some parts of Europe these distinctions don't quite happen either. "Loch" is used for branches of the sea as much as freshwater. In some places "lake" and "lago" are used for both. In fact, without looking it up, "lagoon" is probably related to the Romance word for "lake". River isn't reserved for freshwater in European languages. The Menai Straits are Afon Menai (Menai River) in Welsh. In tradition, the ocean was described as a river encircling the continents.
    "Which makes sense right?"
    Most of them do, except waitapu. Taboos often make little sense, and the reasons can be long forgotten. Sometimes they are just dangerous stretches of water. We used to have notions of taboo here too.
    1-more · 1790020356 · focus · HN ↗
    Not related but related: "tapu" means both "forbidden" and "sacrosanct" and that same double meaning exists in Arabic for "haram" (pork is haram and the Kaaba is in the Masjid al-Haram, for instance). I wonder if that's a pattern in many languages.
    EdwardDiego · 1789735547 · focus · HN ↗
    Lake Taupō, the largest lake in New Zealand, is about the size of Singapore.
    The Hawaiians distinguished between coastal waters and open waters because in their archipelago of far smaller and more numerous islands, the distinction between the two was important. Think currents, waves, depth.
    And I guess I failed to adequately make my point, but I'll try again - when the Polynesians who would become the Māori reached New Zealand, the far larger islands they now inhabited lead them to focus far less on oceanic travel as they pivoted to a focus on the land and rivers they now inhabited.
    So a big lake was effectively the same as the ocean for them - a big body of water.
  4. Utilera · 1789715787 · focus · HN ↗
    The cognate set is real, but jumping from that to "PIE had a word for the sea" assumes the original meaning was already maritime

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