Talk:Κτησιφῶν
Add topicLatest comment: 5 years ago by Florian Blaschke in topic Etymology
Etymology
[edit]@JohnC5: it looks like a compound of κτάομαι (ktáomai) + φωνή (phōnḗ). Maybe it was folk-etymologised? And what about Κτησίβιος (Ktēsíbios)? --Barytonesis (talk) 14:21, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
- @Barytonesis: I assume you mean κτῆσῐς (ktêsis) + φωνή (phōnḗ), but yes, I would say it's folk-etymology. —JohnC5 14:42, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
- @JohnC5: This is idle speculation on my part, but I would argue that, in the light of quite a few other Greek names beginning with κτησι- (several here) the given name is really a Greek compound, while the name of the city is indeed a borrowing, which has been folk-etymologised and conflated with the first. Another option is that the borrowing is the older word, which was folk-etymologised, and from which κτησι- was extracted to create other compounds. It would become a question of relative chronology then.
- As a sidenote: it's convenient to use the abstract nouns in -σῐς (-sis) in our etymologies, but I don't think that's the real origin of the -σι-, which is probably a composition-specific morpheme; cf. [1]. --Barytonesis (talk) 19:27, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
- @Barytonesis: I'd imagine that your first suggestion of folk-etymology is correct. As for the -σῐς (-sis) issue, this is part of a bigger issue that some formations containing -σῐς (-sis) are not synchronic but in fact diachronically inherited from PIE *-tis. I'm not suuuuper worried about it at the moment. —JohnC5 22:38, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
- @JohnC5: Ahah, no worries, I'm not really concerned with that either right now. --Barytonesis (talk) 22:40, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
- @Barytonesis: I'd imagine that your first suggestion of folk-etymology is correct. As for the -σῐς (-sis) issue, this is part of a bigger issue that some formations containing -σῐς (-sis) are not synchronic but in fact diachronically inherited from PIE *-tis. I'm not suuuuper worried about it at the moment. —JohnC5 22:38, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
- The element -φῶν (-phôn) (as in Ξενοφῶν (Xenophôn), Βελλεροφῶν (Bellerophôn) ~ Βελλεροφόντης (Bellerophóntēs)), as far as I know, actually derives from θείνω (theínō) < *gʷʰen-, not φωνή (phōnḗ). Keep in mind that the stem of the toponym and of Ξενοφῶν (Xenophôn) is -φωντ- (-phōnt-).
- To be fair, it is suspicious that the compound doesn't seem to make sense in Greek, and might even be ill-formed. I wonder, though, what the origin of the supposed non-Greek source is supposed to be. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:21, 24 February 2019 (UTC)