Reconstruction talk:Proto-Semitic/šilyat-

I propose to derive the unknown-origin Old Armenian շաղիղ (šałił), շաղաղ (šałał, “flesh; carcass”) from the Aramaic descendant. But the sense development needs an explanation. --Vahag (talk) 19:02, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

@Vahagn Petrosyan: Yes, the vowel of course varies smoothliest in a Semitic tongue.

As for the meaning development, the feminine variant of the suspected earlier borrowing in Arabic, سَلِيلَة (salīla), I glossed “oblong strip of muscles, hide or hair; a long slice of material”. The pattern is like وَشِيقَة (wašīqa, “jerked meat”). It may have various transferred senses, in Moroccan it is some kind of sweet, the details only @Fenakhay understands. “Carcass” or “a strip of meat” is basically what an afterbirth is: They didn’t know the embryological details. Back in the stillbirths were also more common, hence the concept of a deadborn baby could be generalized to “carcass”; due to infant mortality being high one was uncommitted to the children and references to them could be more macabre.

The second variant is also attested at least in Classical Syriac ܫܶܠܳܠܳܐ (šəlālā) with various meanings distributed across lemmas by CAL but that headword I found as per my explanation of شَلِيل (šalīl), which I declared a later borrowing of the same word, a contamination of the foetus or placenta word with another root rather obscure in attestation, in that derivation meaning “suture” and “convoluted situation, hank” but apparently related to “sewing”, secured by Arabic مِسَلَّة (misalla, “packing-needle, only transferred from packing-needle: obelisk”) and even attested in the base stem in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. ܫܾܠܴܐ (šallā, “sack”) is glossed by Bar Bahlul جوالقات so we see which Iranian word it is. I would not know that the whole root is ultimately from this Iranism—it must lie buried in far antiquity—, by the thought of a Sacknadel (“packing-needle”), but it remains a possibility that the whole idea of going in and out, literal unsheathing exposed by سَلَّ (salla) is come from there. سُلّ (sull, “tuberculosis”) may have apart from referring to things being drawn away a macabre reference to sacks or being saggy (our English sag has a separate etymology but German sacken (“to sag”) is strongly associated with Sack (“sack”), and at least you see how that contamination worked). Fay Freak (talk) 19:53, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: I'll look into this more closely later, when I get access to my library again. I am not in Yerevan. --Vahag (talk) 14:28, 19 September 2021 (UTC)