So, the reason why Latvian, Irish, Albanian and Romance languages don't use the original PIE word for "son" is because of some taboo and fear of evil spirits? Meanwhile, Germanics, Slavs and Greeks weren't superstitious jinx-phobes and kept this word.>"This is usually explained as the result of taboo: the ‘real’ word for “son” was avoided so as not to attract the attention of evil spirits. Note that the languages that lack a reflex of this original word (Latin, Celtic, Latvian, Albanian) also lack the corresponding word for “daughter” (cf. Lithuanian duktė̃, Russian дoчь (dočʹ), German Tochter); this suggests that there may have been dialectal differences in Proto-Indo-European concerning words for children."
>>223950258IDK about that but I recall lots of IE cultures avoid the PIE word for "bear" for a similar reason
>>223950286Fascinating.
>>223950258>the Hungarian and Romanian words are false cognatesinteresting
>>223950258whiteness map
>>223950258So, I'm guessing if had we, Slavs, also abandoned "syn", we would most likely use "otrok" instead, from Proto-Slavic *otròkъ ("child", "offspring", "servant").I find this fascinating how Latvian (a Baltic language) had so many semantic shifts, many of its basic words look vastly different from other IE languages, like e.g. jauns ("new"), deguns ("nose"), nāve ("death"), koks ("tree"), gulties ("to lie"), māsa ("sister"), jūra ("sea").
>>223953200Does Polish have the word "otrok" with the same meaning as Czech and Slovak?
>>223950258sin also means blue here
>>223953305We don't use this word in standard Polish. It's either archaic or dialectal. It has both meanings, depending on the region. I believe it's still used in Cieszyn Silesia for "someone who is used for a hard work".
>>223953660>It's either archaic or dialectalSame here. We usually meet it in literature.
>>223950258>macHol up, McDonald's is basically Donaldson?
>>223953660>servant, slave>husbandthat checks out lmao
>>223950258>the ‘real’ word for “son” was avoided so as not to attract the attention of evil spiritsKek this is such a funny thought. This is also why the word for a bear was lost except amongst Germans.
>>223955359I think you got it wrong. Greeks, Latins and Albanians kept the word for "bear" from PIE *h2ŕ̥tḱos, while Germanics, Slavs and Balts came up with their own. It is possible that the Finnic "karhu" also comes from the same PIE word, being borrowed from Proto-Indo-Iranian *Hŕ̥ćšas.
>>223954096Yeah
>>223954096MacGyver is basically Son of Ivar/Ivor
>>223954096Why are you so uneducated?
>>223955934Sometimes, not everything can be noticed at first glance.
>>223952518I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't and Romanians borrowed it from Hungarian.>>223955934I learned this now. Nothing to be ashamed of in learning new things.
>>223953943well we dont, at best it's a coalmuncher thing as the other guy suggested
>>223954096Son of son of Donald
>>223953660In all South Slavic variants I encountered it means "child" but in official languages it only survives in Slovenian and it's always used as an example of false friends between Slovenian and West Slavic languages.In some Chakavian dialects near me they use "otročić" for "little kids" but in my family they just said "dete" so I didn't realize for the longest time that we also had that word.Serbian has a word "ortak" which I though meant the same thing but I see it used in context like "bro/ brother"
>>223953200I never saw it as weird until pointed out like this.I know that for Germanic and Hellenic there is talk of substrate languages contributing non-PIE lexicon, but that is not brought up for Latvian.Growing up, lacking languages that are mutually intelligible (Lithuanians sound almost as foreign as Estonians), I just assumed that is how most languages are, you have your own words.Because we got rolled over by foreigners for 800 years, the words that sound similar you just assume to be borrowed from them.Only if you start looking to it you realize there is a common origin for some of them with other Indo-European languages.Some of these words might be regionalisms, Latvian was peasant language all the way up to 20th century and big gatherings only started happening mid 19th century.Languages seem like something that should emerge slowly over time and then drift apart, but at the same time a language can be created very, very quickly.Many of these regionalisms probably have very funky origins. Some are loan words from German, Polish, Swedish, Russian, and so on while others feel like words local town drunk came up.I don't know if it is an actual linguistic theory,but I have wondered that maybe the reason for language isolates forming is a need for an "covert" tribal language versus a "commercial" regional language.You need to communicate with your neighbors, which most likely is a shared ancestral language, but some things you want to keep between your tribe,so an "artificial" language is created and if your tribe suddenly become successful, it becomes wide spread.The more obvious answer can be remnants of previous populations from older migratory groups like EEFs and so on, but doesn't Papua New Guinea have like 1000 languages and all those guys descend from a dozen people on a boat 2000 years ago?
>>223960216>In all South Slavic variants I encountered it means "child" but in official languages it only survives in SlovenianOh, yeah. I just remembered Slovenian indeed has this word and it uses it for "child". I thought it was Slovak, but they use "dieťa" (cognate with Polish "dziecię", meaning the same thing). I wish I was more familiar with Slovak. It's, like, the closest language to Polish, yet I feel more intrigued with Czech.>>223960700>I know that for Germanic and Hellenic there is talk of substrate languages contributing non-PIE lexicon, but that is not brought up for Latvian.Well, Livonian (a Finnic language) had some impact on Latvian, so in a way, it served as a substrate language. It influenced its initial stress, word order, vowel length and gave it numerous of loanwords, such as puika ("boy"), sēne ("mushroom"), māja ("house") or nūja ("stick"). As for these words>jauns, deguns, nāve, koks, gulties, māsa, jūra, tēvsThey're of IE origin (jauns, for instance, is a cognate with young/Junge/iuvenis) but some of them are either innovations or replacements of previous, original words. naujs --> jauns (yeah, this isn't a metathesis)mēris --> nāvesesuo --> māsaLatvian is cool and sometimes alien-looking for an IE language (though maybe not as much as Albanian or Armenian). Also, you have some German influence in it, but we all have too actually.
>>223950286Uh no there's no evidence for that and it's utterly improvable
>>223961753>I wish I was more familiar with Slovak. It's, like, the closest language to PolishIt's also the closest "northern" Slavic language to South Slavic. It's very likely the people that brought our Slavic languages south split somewhere in central Slovakia, at least for Croatian through Pannonian migrations. There were also migrations through the Alps from Bohemia and through the Black Sea coast.Also I didn't know our word for slave "rob" existed up north
>>223961753I wouldn't consider Livonian a substrate language because it is attested and wasn't completely absorbed.You wouldn't call Etruscan a substrate of Latin, at least I don't think so.The Germanic and Hellenic substrate are only known through their influence in respective languages, they got completely absorbed.In the case of modern Latvian I guess it would be more accurate said that it evolved from Baltic (Curonian, Semigalian, Latgalian) and Livonian with a major influence from German. We apparantly did not have "Yes"("Jā") before Germans, we used to just do shit like this>Are you going to the place>goingI believe there was something that went the other way from us to Estonians/Finns. Livonian might be a source of some of the "alieness" you mentioned.
>>223962073>It's very likely the people that brought our Slavic languages south split somewhere in central SlovakiaI heard about White Croats who used to live somewhere near Kraków or something.>nevolnikWe use niewolnik for "slave" and I don't think we have any synonyms for it in wider use. There is "więzień", of course, but it means more of a prisoner.>>223962444>I wouldn't consider Livonian a substrate language because it is attested and wasn't completely absorbedYeah, that's why I phrased it "in a way".>We apparantly did not have "Yes"("Jā") before Germans, we used to just do shit like this>>Are you going to the place>>goingNow, that's quite interesting because Proto-Indo-European also didn't have a single, dedicated, standalone word for "yes". This may explain why there is so much variation in "yes" across the whole language family. However, pretty much all IE langs are agreeable with the word for "no", which again, wasn't present in PIE.
>>223963089That interesting about the "no".We still sometimes do that thing I gave an example of, but I have no idea how you would do a negation with some form of "no" or "no-".Are there any theories from where it comes or how was it done before hand?
>>223963089Is it true, or does it exist in Polish sources, that some people that moved to the US from Poland in the past would write their ethnicity as "White Croatian"?
>>223950258I get why they were afraid of bears, but why sons?>>223958503I hate you
>>223958503>I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't and Romanians borrowed it from Hungarian.Romanians don't borrow, only steal.
>>223963549>Are there any theories from where it comes or how was it done before hand?I dunno. Wish I knew more.>>223963791I've never delved into this, honestly, but there are indeed some stories about immigrants from the Kraków region who arrived in the States did apparently identify themselves as "Bielochrovati". Records say that approx 100K immigrants arriving from the Kraków area and Lesser Poland declared their nationality as "Bielochorvat"."White Croat” was being used as a historical/regional ethnonym, not necessarily as a rejection of Polish identity, however. It's kinda something like a Silesian claiming to be Silesian without necessarily meaning: "I'm not Polish."
>>223958503>I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't and Romanians borrowed it from Hungarian.Apparently it's inherited from Latin filius, but it's not far-fetched to think that their similarities could result in convergence, in which case you're technically right.
>>223964618>"White Croat” was being used as a historical/regional ethnonym, not necessarily as a rejection of Polish identity, however. It's kinda something like a Silesian claiming to be Silesian without necessarily meaning: "I'm not Polish."Okay I understand now. Here most people emigrated from Dalmatia to the New World and a lot of them would say they were "Dalmatian"
>>223950258what kind of pie?
I wish more people on /int/ wanted to talk about language and culture
>>223967433Well, I'm still here. Tell us more about your language. Is there anything about Latvian that you'd want to fix? How much Lithuanian can you understand? How do you feel about all these Livonian and German loanwords?
>>223950258Poika
>>223967959Sadly I plan to go to bed soon (should have been 2 hours ago)Livonian loan words are almost unnoticeable they are so deeply integrated.>Puika, sēne, māja, nūja, laivamost people have no idea these are loanwords German loanwords have went down in number since 1930s, they are preferable to the more recent alternative.Lithuanian has a bunch of false friends(Alnis/Briedis) and stuff like "Melns" being "blue" in Lithuanian and "black" in Latvian.To me reading Lithuanian is like someone who knows English reading German.It's hard to notice anything I would want to fix, I think it is pretty good besides some missing words.The one thing I would like to see is reintroduction of Ō, we already use O for 3 different sounds>Uo, O, Ooand we use Ā, Ē, Ī and Ū for long vowels so there is no reason not to have Ō for "Oo" sound.Some faggy westerner wanted to introduce Õ or Ö and to represent "Uo" sound because it was "too confusing" and started an online petion,but because the word "ozols" which is a popular surname and culturally important is actually pronounced "Uozols", he was told to get fucked because ain't no way something so culturally important would go from being written "ozols" to "uozols"
>>223968658Ozols means Oak , obviously
>>223967433Half of /int/ should be moved to /bant/ or some other shitpost NSWF board. By moved I mean not allowing certain posters to post here.Insane how racebaiting, softcore porn, random e-whores tweeting about something is almost never removed.
>>223968658>German loanwords have went down in number since 1930sWhy so? Language reform? Purism? The only German loanwords in Latvian I know of are ja, kartupelis and stunda.These Livonian loanwords are simply beautiful. I wish Polish had many Finnic loans too. Łajba - a colloquial term for boat definitely is one of these loans and it comes from the mentioned "laiva".
>>223950258Note here that poika->pojke->boy
>>223950258>So, the reason why Latvian, Irish, Albanian and Romance languages don't use the original PIE word for "son" is because of some taboo and fear of evil spirits?Maybe?At least Proto-Albanian has a weird thing about descriptors.Sun is "The yellow thing"Moon is "The shiny thing"Sea is "The deep thing"While bir (son) is just basically "offspring" (male)
>>223950258Son and boy in my language are interchangeable in the sense that they're both the same word. You have to use the context to figure out wether it's son or boy.Now that I think about it, Iranian languages are all context sensitive.
>>223969310>ŁajbaDidn't know about that one, or maybe I forgot. Still, it's really interesting how languages of different sizes exchange words and structures. I knew Russian has Finnish loan words for fish from Finnish fishermen who went all the way to Kamchatka. It's fascinating how even smaller populations inevitably leave traces in a language like "these guys were here and they went over there".I'd like to learn more about contact linguistics and the history of how the field arrived at its current point. Like how Finnish and Korean were hypothesized by some to be genealogically related. Korean is agglutinative(my spellcheck doesn't know that word kek) and has vowel harmony, but despite being an isolate, the northwestern extent of Korean speakers reaches somewhat close to Manchuria, where you also find the zone of areal diffusion for Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages, which all have vowel harmony to a varying degree. Hypothetically Uralic languages come from there as well, but more likely their similarities come from contact with Turkic speakers who spread to the Urals. So I understand the past hypothesis about Korean and Finnish being related, even if it's pretty much debunked by now.Anyways, I've been itching for something more comprehensive on sprachbunds and contact linguistics as a whole.
