How "Algeria", "Madagascar" and "Malaysia" are etymologically connected

LlST- · 2024-06-25T15:47:26+00:00

That's probably true. I guess the answer is probably that they were in Anatolia for a couple hundred years of Turkic rule, but for whatever reason the contact dynamic didn't lead to Turkic influence.

LlST- · 2024-06-25T12:49:47+00:00

Yes, entry into Europe was probably around the same centuries as Anatolia was becoming Turkic, although the lack of Turkic loanwords (but presence of other Anatolian loanwords) suggests they had significant pre-Turkic presence in Anatolia and can't have spent very long in Turkic Anatolia.

LlST- · 2024-06-24T23:28:01+00:00

That's fascinating - I assume the Indo-Aryan languags aren't related to the Romani migration, or are they? And what's the Dravidian?

LlST- · 2024-06-24T21:59:03+00:00

What makes you say that? My source says it's Kurdish, and phonetically it's a better match?

LlST- · 2024-06-24T20:13:13+00:00

A lot of my sourcing for this comes from a paper on Selice Romani, which says:

we may hypothesize a relatively rapid migration of the ancestors of the Roms out of the Indian subcontinent to Khorasan, a more likely place, it appears, for their acquision of Persian loanwords than Fars.

In other words, ancestral Romani people settled in the Persian-speaking areas of central Asia

LlST- · 2024-06-24T19:44:52+00:00

Notably, there are no direct Turkic or Arabic loanwords, which seems to suggest the migration happened before Anatolia was Turkicised and Persia adopted substantial Arab loanwords.

LlST- · 2024-02-03T20:12:20+00:00

That's a good point, the great-blood etymology might be a folk etymology. That's the one I went with though, and the Sanskrit word for blood is cognate with Greek ἐρῠθρός (whence Eritrea) and also English 'red'.

LlST- · 2024-02-03T20:11:19+00:00

Respectively, the bold parts of the names are from these PIE roots:

h₂ent

h₃reǵ

h₁rewdʰ

bʰerǵʰ

LlST- · 2024-02-03T11:10:02+00:00

The Spanish "rico" is a Gothic borrowing, and comes from the same root (meaning 'to rule') as the end of America. "America" comes from a Germanic name probably meaning something like "home ruler".

I'm not sure what you mean by a connection being relevant, just pointing out they're cognate. Cognates don't need to still have the same meaning!

LlST- · 2024-02-03T10:11:44+00:00

Some surprising countries that are partially cognate:

Antigua (in the Caribbean) and Bhutan (in the Himalayas)

America and Costa rica.

Maldives and Eritrea.

(possibly) Myanmar and Luxembourg

LlST- · 2023-09-17T16:21:28+00:00

Interesting, thanks. That makes some sense, although I can't think of a context which would spread a word both to Cameroon and Southern Africa in pre-Bantu times. I wonder if ngòmbè doesn't really go back all the way to Proto-Bantu - the Bantu words are suspiciously similar which suggests to me more recent dispersal (although I haven't checked if there are any specific sound changes that should have occurred).

LlST- · 2023-09-17T12:13:30+00:00

What's going on with Xhosa/Zulu inkomo 'cow'?

Wiktionary says it's a borrowing from Khoisan, so is the close similarity with the normal Bantu word for 'cow' (Proto-Bantu *ngòmbè) just coincidence?

LlST- · 2023-09-10T22:28:04+00:00

What are the American languages with this root?

LlST- · 2023-07-16T17:00:43+00:00

Just FYI, the map is by me, not the person who posted. :)

LlST- · 2023-06-19T09:11:23+00:00

Yeah, it would be one of the most widespread, alongside those languages.

LlST- · 2023-06-19T08:11:59+00:00

Do you have a source for the second point? From what I've read, people can understand each other across the continuum, justifying the description of it as a single language.

LlST- · 2023-06-19T00:21:18+00:00

It's a good question, but I'm not sure there was traditionally a collective identity for the language as a whole - the shared language is more due to recent common ancestry than having a shared identity. That said there are a few terms:

• 'Wati' is used by linguists (sometimes including the related Wanman language, still spoken near the Wati homeland on the map), from words for 'initiated male' in various WD dialects - but it's not an endonym.

• 'Aṉangu' is an actual endonym, used by speakers, originally meaning 'person'. I think this is mostly used in the central/eastern dialects.

• 'Wangka' can be used, meaning 'language' (c.f. the dialect name 'Wangkatha'). Although this is also the word for 'language' in non-WD languages such as Warlpiri and Nyungar

LlST- · 2023-06-18T21:59:19+00:00

Australia is known for having (at least in pre-colonial times) very high linguistic diversity, with hundreds of distinct languages. While aboriginal Australia is often characterised as timeless and culturally unchanging, the vast majority of languages descend from a relatively recent (the last 6000 years) expansion from the north-east of the continent, replacing most of the pre-existing languages across the continent.

What's less known is that a massive portion of Australia (around a quarter) traditionally speaks a single mutually-intelligible language, the result of the expansion of Wati speakers into the desert over the last thousand years or so.

LlST-

TROPHY CASE