|
|
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 8
stranger
|
stranger
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 8 |
A "calque" is also a form of semantic extension whereby the multiple meanings of a word in one language are assigned to a word with one of those meanings in another.
Thus, kosmos in Greek refers to both a woman's cosmetics and to the universe, distinguished from khaos (the root of both is kosm-, to make or be orderly). In Latin, rather than borrow kosmos from Greek or create a neologism, the meaning "universe" was assigned, by a calque, to mundus (cosmetics).
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
OOO! Akatsukami is a keeper! rather than borrow kosmos from Greek or create a neologism, the meaningng "universe" was assigned, by a calque, to mundus (cosmetics).
Welcome aboard-- that is just the sort of trivial word knowledge i love to know!
and do you know more greek? (alas, greek is greek to me!)
i sort of know that Galexy is from the greek for milk, making "milky way galexy" redundent..but is not quite the same word a milk.. so what does galexy mean??(in greek, that is!)
welcome, welcome, welcome--
and what is the meaning of akatsukami- it sounds japanese.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 393
enthusiast
|
|
enthusiast
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 393 |
The only Western Gemanic language that I know that lost the -g at the end of day is English but one would expect Finnish to have gotten their loans from a Northern Germanic language.
In early Germanic medial -g- was a fricative. It retained this valued in Norse (dagr). In Old English some inflectional forms had front vowels, so it had the value -j- in such words: daeges. This was given the spelling -y in Middle English, so day.
Modern Finnish has no G (except in NG, which is a mutation of NK). There's a softening mutation of consonants between vowels when starting a closed syllable: T becomes D, P becomes V, and K disappears (and double TT PP KK become single). So in older Finnish there would have been a fricative GH that K turned into.
My guess (and only a guess) is that the -tai of the Finnish day names is not a borrowing from a Germanic *-dai, but a development within Finnish from *-tagh borrowed from *-dagh.
I have an idea that Germanic and Finnic directly abutted in what is now Poland, before Slavs spread into the area.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
Welcome aBoard, Akatsukami. Please tell me more – I had thought that mundus simply meant ‘world’, giving us other words like mundane and the other Romanace languages words like mondiale etc ... but that could be just because I got thrown out of Latin classes for hurling suasages at the teacher) 
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
Oh, do you know if english as any make up/cosmetic type words that have the old latin mundus as a root? i can't think of any.
--Kohl-- a type of eye make up comes to english from Arabic, and is related to the word alcohol.. the eye make up was made by fermenting certain fruits/berries, the juice was then thickened and use as eye lid coloring..
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
Nicholas, while we have your attention ... I remember hearing (or reading) somewhere, as I do in my magpie way, that Finnish is unrelated to other European languages, and that it has more in common with Japanese than its neighbouring language groups. Is this correct? I also remember seeing an American documentary on TV in Zild which portrayed the Finns as a pretty joyless lot, illustrated by their love of the tango, which they seem to dance in droves without any obvious sign of pleasure. The same documentary stated that male Finns have one of the highest (if not the highest) suicide rates in the world. I suppose that this could be true, given the number of Finns who drive very quickly on very bad roads for a living ... 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
CK
Finnish is related to Hungarian--not to any other language groups in europe..
it might be related to other language groups else where too, idunno, and i think the similarity was that the Finnish language group and Japenese both use post postitions, not prepostions (or something of that nature)
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 8
stranger
|
|
stranger
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 8 |
I'm not a Greek speaker, although I know a few roots and a little grammar.
"Galaxy" is indeed Greek; not surprisingly, the ancient Greeks called the strip of dense stars part of the galactic plane the "Milky Circle". Of course, they did so in Greek: galaxias kuklos. (Greek gala, "milk" is probably non-IE, possibly Old Mediterranean).
Akatsukami is in fact an archaic Japanese word meaning "incarnate deity" (used to refer the tenno (emperor)); in modern parlance, I believe one would say aramikami. How it to be applied to me is an only marginally interesting story involving a naïve young financial analyst and a guy who wanted to pose as a C programmer.
Frankly, I can't think of any reflexes of mundus in English save "mundane".
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
and it shows up again in galactose, a milk sugar-- and changed (both as a word and chemical compound,) as lactose (an other milk sugar. Medically, many problems with nursing have galaand galac as part of the word form. but the more common in English is the lac/lacto form--
and for what its worth, my dictionary says it does go back to IE.. *glak
|
|
|
|
Forums16
Topics13,913
Posts229,344
Members9,182
| |
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
|
|
|
0 members (),
782
guests, and
2
robots. |
|
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
|
|
