From: Tommy Tyrberg
Message: 235
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"
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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
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