New answers tagged etymology
1
Latin opposes participles with -nt- (active) to -d- (passive-stative).
If you believe in Kortlandt's effect, that is to say the alternation between *H1 and *d in a number of words and roots, then -d- in timi-d-us and -eH1- in tim-e-o are basically the same morpheme *-d- with and without Kortlandt's effect.
-4
Yes you are right. You only forgot finger with -r suffix like live liver, bite bitter.
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Indeed, as has been pointed out in the comments, the reason these words look alike is because most of those languages are related, descended from a common ancestor. Languages change over time, and because different changes can happen in different areas or groups of speakers, dialects develop and can diverge sufficiently to split into new languages. We have ...
0
Does PIE *wehros or even *weh have descendant anywhere in all of Indo-Iranian?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/weh%E2%82%81ros
If not, seems unlikely.
1
This isn't that strange, I don't think, although it's a semantic pathway that does not appear to have been looked at specifically very much by historical linguists. In many unrelated language families, you see semantic maps for particular lexical items where words related to ``truth'' or some other expression of epistemic mood (what the speaker knows or ...
0
According to Wiktionary, -idus is "suffix forming adjectives", but most of the words in the Category:Latin words suffixed with -idus, are based on a verb.
-or is similarly "used to form a third-declension masculine abstract noun from a verb root or conceived root form"
So the relationship is that these are morphemes commonly used to form ...
3
Before leaping to conclusions about prehistoric borrowing, you should consider two alternative hypotheses: (1) echoic origin, and (2) coincidental similarity.
Arabic lacks an obvious cognate to KRT (כרת), but it has QŢ3 (قطع), QŢM (قطم), and QŢŢ (قطط) all meaning cut. Perhaps KT and QT imitated the sound of chopping, or KRT the sound of sawing.
Random ...
2
The words Dutch, French, English, and Spanish are general adjectives which could refer to a person, clothing, language, architecture etc. There are some words that only refer to people, such as "Dutchman, Frenchman, Englishman" with -man, and Spaniard with -iard. There are a handful of other constructions with -man including Scotsman, Irishman, ...
2
I don't understand what you're saying about those examples, but it looks like you're talking about compositional meaning versus non-compositional meaning. To take a really obvious example, the meaning of the word "cats" is trivially deducible (a compositional function) from the meaning of the parts "cat" and "-s", and the ...
1
I am aware of the terms transparent (for a predictable meaning) and opaque (for a word form unrelated to the meaning). There is some continuum in the notion of transparency/opaqueness allowing for shades of grey between fully transparent and fully opaque.
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Wiktionary:short #Translations seems to be a good start for answering such questions with regard to modern/living languages.
It has no grouping by language families, however.
3
Just to add a bit to Adam's excellent answer:
"Cumin" is what's called a Wanderwort or wander-word: it's a word associated with some sort of trade good, which spreads from language to language along with the thing it describes. A famous modern example is "tea"; almost every language in the world now refers to the drink with a word that ...
6
... is said to derive from ...
This is folk etymology. In a case like this, where it's a similar sounding word in many unrelated languages across a region, you should be especially skeptical.
The Wiktionary entry for kömény:
A wanderword, arrived to Hungarian possibly via German, but a West Slavic borrowing cannot be excluded, either. Compare German ...
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