Re: sorok

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1852
Date: 2000-03-13

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Guillaume JACQUES
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 7:02 PM
Subject: [cybalist] sorok

Guillaume wrote: Anybody has an idea why turkic kIrk "fourty" was loaned as sorok into Russian - I mean, the svabhakti vowel is normal, but what about the palatalisation of the initial an why an s- ? I supposed it is due to the second palatalisation, but in this case the turkic form should have been xIrk , and not kIrk. Does anybody know a turkic language where this k- is palatalised (it is surprising in front of a back vowel) ? Any other explanation for the russian form (are there other slavonic
languages that dropped the old word for fourty ?).
 
Bernhard Comrie discusses the origin of East Slavic sórok very competently in his long and detailed article on "Balto-Slavonic" in Jadranka Gvozdanović (ed.) Indo-European Numerals. He rejects a Byzantine-Greek etymology also offered for this numeral and notes that in older Northern Russian sórok meant 'a sack of 40 sable furs'. He connects it with Russian soróCka 'shirt, blouse', and Lithuanian Sar~kas 'fisherman's coat', Svar~kas 'night-dress'; Old Norse serkr (as in berserk or the in Scots loan (cutty) sark) seems related to all of the above. As the word is isolated in Old Norse and not found elsewhere in Germanic, borrowing from Baltic to Scandinavian seems more likely than in the other direction. Can anyone think of IE cognates derivable from *k'(w)ork-o-?
 
As for non-decimal words for 40 in non-East Slavic languages, some Serbo-Croatian dialects have mero:v and Slovak dialects have meru (related, I think, to *mE:r- 'measure', though I haven't checked that).
 
In the extinct Polabian and Slovincian dialests of West Slavic a vigesimal system based on stig '20' (vith dialectal variants) used to be employed. This word is a loan from German (Steige). A possible trace of sexagesimal counting is West Slavic kopa '60', sometimes used in Polish when the objects counted are eggs and colloquially in kopa lat 'ages (ago)'.
 
Piotr