Re: [tied] House and City

----- Original Message -----

From: longgren@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 12:52 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] House and City

Every culture has a word for house, or the equivalent. The Mongolian yurt is a cognate of yard and the -grad in Belgrade. The Sumerians had a cognate of this word, as did Semites and Indians. (-garh)  This root covers everything from a barnyard to a megacity. There is Hebrew and Arabic qiryat (village). For the Sumerians it was a merchant area of a town.  Over and over we see a root that once meant a modest dwelling transformed into a city. Why not *par?

 

Can you present any evidence for these connections, other that your intuition? The IE words like Slavic *gord- are of course related (via PIE *gHordH-o- [*gHor-to-?]), but the original meaning is clearly "a fenced area", which might indeed cover a variety of secondary meanings, from "yard" to "town" (there were no megacities yet in PIE times).

> Mongolian hhot (city) is probably related to our words house and hut. There are cognates with "hut" all over the place too. Some of them mean "fort".  People from Greece were boating to islands in 8,000 BC, longbefore there were boats in Egypt.

 

"Probably"? How probably? Here again, you offer an assumption that seems to be based on a subjective hunch.

 

> Does anyone know the origin of "palace"?

 

It's from Pala:tium -- the Palatine Hill in Rome, where the imperial residence was located.

 

> A Celtic dun was just a small wooden fort, wasn't it?  Don't you think it might be related to to Indo-European "dom" for house or building?  Look at Russian dom (house).
Then, you get domicile, dun, town and so on. Armenian tun means house.

Arm. tun is a regular reflex of PIE *dom- 'house, household', but Celtic *du:n- is unrelated. It belongs to a small family of words clustering around the meaning "hill".

 

Piotr