Dear Dennis:
Rosemary asked me to pass on the following passage from J.P. Mallory’s
“In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology and Myth” (which is
actually a good book).“Our review of Proto-Indo-European culture omits volumes that have been
written about the reconstructed vocabulary, since much falls under the
category of predictable phenomena or else items not readily retrievable by
the prehistorian from any other source other than language. Day, night,
earth, sky, clouds, sun, moon and star can all be found in the reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European vocabulary. We may be confident that the
Proto-Indo-Europeans were physically similar to us and that many of their
anatomical parts are linguistically retrievable through the comparison of
Indo-European languages. Indeed, it is bizarre recompense to the scholar
struggling to determine whether Proto-Indo-Europeans were acquainted with
some extremely diagnostic item of material culture only to find that they
were far more obliging in passing on to us no less than two words for
‘breaking wind’. English dictionaries may occasionally shrink from including
such vulgar terms as ‘fart’ but the word gains status when set within the
series: Sanskrit pardate, Greek perdo, Lithuanian perdzu, Russian perdet’,
Albanian pjerdh ‘to fart loudly’ (distinguished from Proto-Indo-European
*pezd- ‘to break wind softly’).”Ciao,
RobertProto-Indo-European CultureE-Mail)
Not one, but two different words for breaking wind. Ah… this… THIS is why I became an English professor!
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Georgie, assuming "Aryan" and "Aristocracy" shares the same Proto-IE root seems feasible, but I am not a linguist. My fields include Rhetoric and Composition, Theory, and Comics. I remember taking a Word Studies course during my undergraduate career, which explains how I am able to follow derivations in the American Heritage Dictionary, so I cannot call you out on anything.
Thanks Bobby. I imagine the Romans took this word, like so many other things, from the Greek! Seriously though, given that one means 'noble' and the other includes the meaning 'best people', don't you think it's likely they share the same Proto-IE root?
Georgie
Georgie, According to the _American Heritage Dictionary_, the root for "Aryan" comes from Sanskrit's arya- which means "noble". The root of "Aristocrat" originates from French's aristocrate, but "Aristocracy" goes back to a Late Latin root of aristocratia, meaning "government by the best".
Hi Dennis and others - Perhaps you can clear up something for me. I assumed that 'aristocrat' ('best people') had the same root as 'Aryan' but I can't find anything to confirm this. Not that I presently have much access to the literature. Collins Dictionary only takes it back to the Greek. Do you have any info on this?
Regards
Georgie
That's a good one, Georgie! Thanks.
Dear Robert and Dennis - re 'fart' as a PIE word. While living in NZ many years ago, an Indo-Fijian friend who had been living in NZ and Australia for many years told how his Urdu (an IE language from the Sanskrit branch) was slipping. While on a visit to Fiji, he was sitting out in the backyard reading. His mother asked him in Urdu what he was doing, and he inadvertently replied in that language: 'I am farting'. This was because the Urdu word for 'reading' should have had a 'rr' phoneme instead of the simpler 'r' sound (this is from memory, incidentally, so I can't swear this was the exact mistake). I'd recently done a unit in linguistics and was doing further reading on the subject of IE origins for interest, so when I heard 'pard-' for 'farting' I became very excited, as it is a perfect example of Grimm's Law.
Georgie
Adrian, that's a very detailed and interesting comment. I confess I'm far from an expert on the subject, but perhaps Google will bring your post to the attention of someone who is.
I'm looking for a PIE forum to enter some putative iedas about it and a few tenuous data,
The problem with puzzles is that one has to serendipitously stumble into parts of the puzzle until it makes a pattern, and PIE is one vastly ignored previously can of worms.
Example, marriage, I've reconstructed a Maori Syllabary ruined by Victorian Williams alphabetisation. Maori culture is stone age old and its art has affinities with inuit art, so noted by several people. As such maori has no marriage or, as far as I can work out a ceremony. people just hutch together and every man is supposed to have a woman, if not more, quite casually. If chidlren happen it tends to get permanent Children belong to the tribe and parent as such does not really exist as all elders are family. If a chiild does not get on with its actualparents it simplky moves in with an aunt or uncle, meaning anybody on the trive, more usually a widow. In Inuit marriage is a pragmatic affair, having nothing to do with sex, which is a means to get "I owe you one" points in case of need one can call on. In Maori a chief collects the most kudos points to have mana, if he does socially gauche things he loses some. Consequently one won't find many words for it all very un-european Maori is a nice almost pure culture which has tweo stops n nga w wha, no stress, 4 parts of speech with a strict word order, all words can be used in a mundane, eat and shit sense and sacred or spiritual concerns the entire demoractic tribe, they are not necessarily very nice to neighbours. I have a few more too
adrian