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#147628 09/09/05 12:48 PM
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>extraneous tease<

Dang, never even noticed it!


#147629 09/09/05 12:48 PM
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old hand
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"sidero-" means both (iron and star)
Tempting .. in the meantime I found this:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Humanities/TechnologyGrecoRoman.html
but I find this explanation improbable, bordering on spurious..


#147630 09/09/05 12:55 PM
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>>I find this<<

Interesting article. "Unimportant" though? To whom? Specific iron meteorites were *very* important to certain tribes that used them to forge tools, esp. weapons, from.


#147631 09/09/05 02:27 PM
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but I find this explanation improbable, bordering on spurious

As the author points out, finding Greek σιδηρος (sideros) 'iron' and Latin sidus, -eris, 'star, constellation' cognates goes against how Greek and Latin developed phonologically. Latin sidus has been compared to the Germanic words for silver and slag, but those comparisons are not without problems, too. In the end the usually PIE root suggested (by Buck, Walde, Pokorny, et al.) is *sueid- 'to glow'. (Also, the -r- in the Latin word is probably a result of rhotacization (-VsV- => -VrV-).) The Greek word has no appealing etymology, and is thought to be a loan from some unknown language. A terminus post quem for the borrowing would be the (hypothesized) time of sV- => hV- in Greek historical phonology.



Ceci n'est pas un seing.
#147632 09/09/05 06:21 PM
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> I'm asking about the make-up of the words siderurgy and siderated as per ullrich's original post. I'm astsuming the root is the tsame.

in other words, coming full circle, that was a bad astsumptsion.
<g>


#147633 09/09/05 07:43 PM
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>that used them to forge tools, esp. weapons, from.


If they had the iron, why not make real tools from it?



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Re: siderated: "Ill-fated" or "blasted" ?

...So when used to mean "struck with lightning" it is synonymous with "unlucky" in the sense of being "star-crossed" or merely "blasted"


Then where do all the positive the words like "considerate" come from? Are we to conclude that "con-" here means not "with" but rather "against", the opposite of "pro" = for? Or is there a considerably different root here altogether?

All of those don't seem to have much relationship to "sider-" = iron or star, either.



#147635 09/10/05 12:11 AM
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Sidérer is a very common French term that means "struck down with awe" in a negative manner. A person will be sidéré if he loses his job suddenly.


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>>considerate<<

Terrible guess deleted. But see "consider": intensive pref. "com" + sider (star). [prob. connected to astronomy?]


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"Then where do all the positive the words like "considerate" come from?"

According to my dictionary, "consider", etymologically, means: 'examine the stars' from the Latin 'considerare' and "sidus".

Perhaps in its original use, to consider something meant to consult the stars for an answer.


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