Talk:შოლტი

@Fay_Freak: BTW, how 'old' are these semitic words? Do they have some kind of reconstruction? I find a semitic borrowing during Proto-Georgian-Zan unity more believable tbh. კვარია (talk) 09:09, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

@კვარია: There isn’t much reconstruction done for Semitic languages, reason being apart from their being perceived as difficult that their structure revolves around three consonants into which transfixes are inserted for derivation, so etymologies of individual words in a language are either obvious in their internal or external connection if cognate roots exist or they are speculative if irregularities like dissimilations and roots developing from other roots are assumed.

The total number of dictionaries is also übersichtlich, as also documented on Wiktionary:About Arabic#How to add references to sources and hinted at Talk:خ ت م, and no Semitic language has a comprehensive etymological dictionary, though Leslau writes everything he has read of derivations in his Gəʿəz, Harari and Gurage dictionaries, which is quite exceptional and shows that one would have studied reading journal articles a whole life to know about Semitic etymologies rather than consulting a dictionary. As I have noted in some reference sections like رمس, Corriente, Federico, Pereira, Christophe, Vicente, Angeles, editors (2017), Dictionnaire du faisceau dialectal arabe andalou. Perspectives phraséologiques et étymologiques (in French), Berlin: De Gruyter, →ISBN tries to be one and likes to constantly derive triliteral roots from biconsonantal roots but so it turns out wrong often enough in so far as they miss alternative methods and this derivation isn’t statistically likely to be that often—same problem as with Beekes’s constant “pre-Greek” claims for Ancient Greek etymologies—, and albeit being from but five years ago due to lack of etymological reference words they have to ingeniously discern many etymologies from scratch and one also sees in some sloppinesses that some fields are beyond their paygrades, often explaining with mistranscribed Iranian forms and questionable Egyptian glosses—which shows a problem similar to that of Modern English etymologies, the language having been in too many places in contact with multiple difficult language groups, with the additional complication of that having been the case in a spottily documented past already, and to know Middle Iranian one has to read even obscurer journals!

This way we don’t really have works looking from the other end at reconstructing Semitic vocabulary as a whole—and for various theories its grammar too is highly disputed—but only some lists of basic vocabulary, {{R:sem-pro:SED}} does best with body parts and animal names but thereby again meets the problem of dubious sound changes to that extent that half of either volume ends up inane speculation.

That being said, the Semitic family of سَوْط (sawṭ) has been left unetymologized.

Arabic literature as present to us begins in the 5th century, understandably after we have to assume scriptless nomads (the Ancient North Arabic inscriptions may or may not be Arabic in part but they are not literature and while online won’t explain most questions), its “golden age” is in the 9th and often we miss attestations of words preceding the 8th.

For Syriac literature we posit the Peshitta in the later 4th if not 5th century, and you see when the Babylonian Talmud was written: on the article Wikipedia nicely gives a sidebar with dates, and the earliest targumim are set to about 200 CE while later ones are even Arabic-influenced as noted on Hebrew זַנְגְּבִיל (zangəḇī́l). Everything else is lucky, while browsing CAL which gives all dialects a word occurs in and quotes, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Christian Palestinian Aramaic attestations are very occasional and would not bring us beyond 50 CE, so we may come a third of a millennium further than the usual age in which Syriac and Old Georgian and Armenian are attested; Biblical Aramaic is a short corpus, then come the inscriptions.

So I look into the quotes given by CAL and the dictionaries it links. Both the whip and the staff senses are in Targum Jonathan.

For Hebrew one has the Old Testament attestations in Gesenius and Koehler-Baumgartner. You would think they are as old as 1 Kings but you should see that none attests literal use of the sense of whip, and you would not need to assume it at all, as explained on Classical Syriac ܫܘܛܐ (šawṭā), there are two homonymous roots by which it is easy to assume the senses of “a curse” and “a sudden flood”, while the meaning of “a whip” is in this understanding superimposed by the exegetic tradition of Mishnaic Hebrew—you presumably have seen on Wiktionary with Old Armenian if not Old Georgian (?) already that often one discovers meanings to be ghost meanings, a far heavier problem than ghost words.

So we lie somewhere in between Old Georgian and the assumed date of Proto-Georgian-Zan.

What’s the evidence for velarization of Kartveli /l/ at that point? Fay Freak (talk) 15:33, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

@Fay_Freak: That's very interesting. I didn't expect such a complicated backstory. (You could say you caught me off guard with such a detailed answer. :p) Zan (Mingrelian-Laz) with a few exceptions undergo /l/ > /r/ change. Ls aren't velarized. კვარია (talk) 07:27, 24 January 2022 (UTC)