Re: Odp: Prehistoric Ethnogenic Processes

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 233
Date: 1999-11-11

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Valentyn Stetsjuk
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 1999 6:24 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Prehistoric Ethnogenic Processes


> 5) Some of your word identifications are not very convincing (eg, Eng.
> jump – Yagn. jumb "to move", 

The translation is not correct. It may be approximately "to move swift"
Just a minor etymological warning. The voiced alveopalatal affricate could not occur word-initially in Old English. Most words that have it in that position today are French/Latinate loanwords (jelly, jealous, Jesus, giraffe, George, join, junior) dating back to Middle or Early Modern English, or relatively recent coinages, usually of obscure origin but for the most part vaguely onomatopoeic (jig, jiggle, jolt, jitter, jeer). Jump belongs to the latter category, being first attested in the 16th century. The initial vowel virtually guarantees that the word cannot be inherited from pre-Middle English times.
 
More generally, words meaning 'move energetically' often carry some sound-symbolic signal (such as the phoneme /z/ in English whizz, zip, zoom) and should be treated with more than usual caution in etymological comparison. Their similarity may be due neither to cognacy nor to chance, but to some universal "phonesthetic" preferences. Old English had hoppian 'to hop' which may well be the ancestor of ModE hop, but could also be an independent onomatopoeic word. I would not attempt to reconstruct PIE *kub- to account for it. In my native Polish hop! is an exclamation accompanying a jump. No relation, of course, except in terms of psychological universals.
 
Piotr