Reconstruction talk:Proto-Slavic/kriti

Mixture of roots

Fay Freak, isn't it premature to mix all meanings under the same form? The meaning purchase, trade is referenced by several authors to be from Proto-Indo-European *kʷreyh₂-, the meaning curving, cylindricity attested in *kridlo, *krivъ, and likely *krina seems to be from *(s)ker- +‎ *-éyti, and the third semantic kernel sieving, separating attested in *krida, *krojiti seems to be from Proto-Indo-European *krey- (possibly underlying *kreh₁- (“to split”)). Just because the Slavic terms formally resemble each other, it does not mean they are directly cognate. As a matter of fact, there are a few more semantic nuances that are attested in Slavic roots starting with *kre-/*kri-, e.g. *krěti (“to recover, to strengthen”), *krěskъ (“scream”) (onomatopoeic). For comparison, *kry (“blood”) and *kryti (“to hide”) also resemble each other, but the general consensus is that they are not cognates (at least I haven't found anyone making such a claim). Безименен (talk) 14:09, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

@Bezimenen: There is no such consensus. The authors do not realize all these meanings and talk past each other, only trying to get to the “Indo-European” part. One should stop trying to explain the obscure from the even more obscure by trying to fit in everything into some vague “Indo-European” which is after all reconstructed also from Proto-Slavic so the argumentation becomes circular. You see yourself there are various semantic nuances that are attested in Slavic roots starting with *kr- so it is hard enough to sort these things out in Slavic, and do things become more certain by going back five millenia?

Also it is entirely possible on Wiktionary to treat terms with different etymologies in one go, without different etymology sections (Etymology 1, Etymology 2 …) and rather say something like “the meaning X is from” and “the meaning Y is from”. Especially if one does not know anyway whether there are two different words or it is all the same so it is rather “Y might be from”. In this case I find it difficult to imagine even that there were two different verbs *kriti of unrelated meaning “to turn” and “to buy” used in Proto-Slavic speech. It is easier to think that it is the same word, particularly knowing that economical terms are based across languages on “turning” metaphors.

*kry (“blood”) and *kryti (“to hide”) do not resemble each other with inflected forms.

The meaning of a sieve may be related to the form of the container called *krina or to the idea of water being lost in a wadi in *krinica. A sieve does not really cut anything, but I agree it may be unrelated and rather belong to *krojiti, this being unrelated. Note that I doubt that there is a common term for the sieve descended from Proto-Indo-European. The Indo-European words may be early borrowings or mutual calques. Proto-Semitic hadn’t a term either, only culture words (see غِرْبَال (ḡirbāl), and مِنْخَل (minḵal) is a coincidental parallel formation to the Syriac manḥāl, perhaps with early interference between Semitic languages in shaping the meaning “to sift” of the root). It is underestimated how primitive and far away the Indo-European culture is. Fay Freak (talk) 14:40, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: ok, your point makes sense. I'm leaving the final judgement to you. Btw, I'm not sure either that PIE had a word for sieve. Just in Slavic there are a few more terms besides *krida, which carry a similar meaning: *sito, *cědъ and in some contexts even *rešeto (“lattice”), *teneto (“snare”). Likely each sub-family picked some root that means to split, to divide, to chop or to strain, to compress (or something along these lines) and coined their own word for 'sieve' independently. Безименен (talk)

@Bezimenen: I discern now more expressly a methodological recurrence I explain you with a simile:

If *lopъ (“leaf”) weren’t a word in some Bulgarian dialects and Baltic we wouldn’t know this word existed in Proto-Slavic. In consequence of this failure of humanity to document the ancestor term scholars would derive the widespread and common terms that we see to simply derive from this noun, as *lopuxъ (“burdock”) which is found everywhere though the basic noun isn’t, from the remotest roots, from some garbled Proto-Indo-European form of varying appearance (you can imagine such a form better than I, luckily I do not need to reconstruct PIE), because if they don’t recognize the pertinent Proto-Slavic terms then they can at best only see similarities in other Indo-European languages and contrive their “roots” from it, because if one compiles a lexicon linearly one *has to* account for the etymology of every word and provide a rational explanation if etymology is one’s profession, as one needs to show that one’s training and tenure is worth it. And to concoct roots is more glorious than to deny them, so you see the dynamics pursuant to which the quest for truth is overshot. But it can as well be that a word from which a term easily derived after PIE got lost after that and before being recorded, the case of the listed *kri- terms may be seen so: The verb from which all derives is not even directly attested in the needed meaning and you see how far the Indo-Europeanist thoughts go, in spite of Indo-European being away ten times as far as Proto-Slavic to the earliest attestations of the Slavic term, in spite of the known statistics about lexical retention and the chances of coincidence in a limited set of phonemes: if there are many names for containers there will also be coincidental independent matches between different language groups. Funnily, you excelled academia here in seeing such a verb only left in derived terms but you also imitated them in going straight to Indo-European. Fay Freak (talk) 16:40, 12 May 2020 (UTC)