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Joined: Nov 2003
Posts: 81
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Nov 2003
Posts: 81 |
I suppose the modern sense 'comparative' is too specific. 'Directional', perhaps? That might account for all those direction words like 'inter' and 'dexter' having it. Then there's Latin 'alter', 'uter', English 'other', 'either', etc.
I would have guessed the ma-ter, bhra-ter, pa-ter, dhugha-ter ones were different, maybe agent nouns, related to Latin -tor, and neuter instrument nouns: arator = ploughman, aratrum = plough. But if the experts can connect them, who am I to argue?
The two in-s are only the same in Latin: one's English 'in', Greek 'en', the other's 'un-' and 'a-'. But I know you know that. :)
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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
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Walde, in his Latin Etymological dictionary, suggests that alter 'one (of two)' is a comparative without the -yo- of the positive alius 'another, other'. Other words are alteruter 'one of two, either' and altroversum 'on the other side'. Uter 'which (of the two)' and its sibling neuter 'neither of the two'. The two Latin ins come from the same reconstructed root, but different grades: in 'in' from the full grade *en and in- (privative suffix) from *n. I'm not as sure about the in (intensive prefix) as in inflammo and inclutus.
I tend to think of comparison as somewhat logical (like in set theory), but I like your idea that it could be directional. There's definitely a spatial component to prepositions and adverbs.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear jheem: so when you take a pet to the vet to be deprived of his/her posterity, the pet comes back
"neither of the two". I never heard the etymology before.
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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
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Yup, the "two" referring to masculine and feminine grammatical genders. Not the other two little witnesses that got removed. It seems that PIE had two genders: animate and inanimate which map roughly to non-o-stem masculine/feminine and neuter. Later, what became the feminine developed out of neuter plurals reanalyzed as abstract nouns, e.g., bona 'goods'.
Some folks get bent out of shape when historical linguists talk about grammatical versus natural gender, charging all kinds of PC tippytoeing, but there are many languages that have grammatical gender (ultimately from Latin genus 'kind') that does not map at all to natural (biological or sexual) gender. For example, Kiswahili (and other Bantu) languages have a whole passel (more than 10) of genders, and gender concord not only between adjectives and substantives, as we're used to in IE lgs, but also between verbs and nouns. The genders are marked with prefixes (cf. mtu and bantu 'person' and 'people').
And there's that -st again in the preposition post 'after'. Aft, after, aftest?
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210 |
way coolest.  hey, maybe one of you megalangs could put together a little list of all the acronyms, such as PIE, and MnE(or whatever that was...), and Jackie could sticky it up in I&A... just a thought...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
It occurred to me to wonder what bitches are "spayed".
spay
PRONUNCIATION: sp
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: spayed, spay·ing, spays
To remove surgically the ovaries of (an animal).
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English spaien, from Anglo-Norman espeier, to cut with a sword, from espee, sword, from Latin spatha. See spathe.
I used to have a colleague named "Spadea" - something about
swords in his ancestry?
Notice also that modern "épée used to be "espee"
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Aft, after, aftest?
Oth, other, othest?
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
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Not to prolong the absurd, but two out of three look interesting:
both, bother, botherest
...sorry. Really couldn't resist.
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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
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Notice also that modern "épée" used to be "espee"
And the e is prothetic. And after a while, the s was no longer pronounced, and it even dropped out of the orthography, but it left its trace in the accent.
Your spay got me to thinking of scalpel: L scalpellus, scalpellum, diminutive of scalper, scalprum 'chisel, knife' (from earlier *scalp-lo-) from scalpere 'to scratch, carve'; cf. Gk skalops 'mole'.
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Joined: Sep 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
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In reply to:
cf. Gk skalops 'mole'
So the scalpel is related to the animal, linguistically at least, with one slicing and the other scratching. Again, as usual, jheem, very interesting.
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