--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>
[...]
> This should immediately ring a bell. Lat. sinus has exactly the
right form and meaning. Apart from 'bent surface, curve, fold' it
means BOTH 'bosom, lap' AND 'bay, gulf'. Since these are derived,
rather than inherited, meanings in Latin (e.g. 'bosom' from 'the
hanging fold of a toga'), and the word has no obvious connections
outside Latin (as far as I know), it seems obvious that the Albanian
word is a loan rather than a cognate. There is one difficulty with
this. <gji> must be older than the loans in which Lat. s- gives Alb.
sh- before a vowel, and it forces us to assume that the initial
voicing of old *s- in pre-Albanian (> Mod. Alb. gj-) took place
_during_ Latin-Albanian contacts, not _before_ them. Any ideas how
to test this hypothesis?
>
I am not so sure gji is a loanword. A form *sino- (*sH1i-no-)
derived from the root of Lat. sino: 'give way, lag' would make the
meaning 'bay' parallel with Old Norse vík 'inlet' from víka 'give
way, weichen'. The semantic development must then be
from 'Meerbusen' to 'Busen' of the body; I consider it too odd for a
word meaning 'giving way, sagging' to be used in the
meaning 'breast', since that can hardly be the *defining*
characteristic, whereas a 'curve' of the body may well be named
after a curve of the landscape. German <Wange> may offer a parallel
for that. The 'inlet' itself may have been so named in the first
place because the coast line gives way to the sea. Then,
secondarily, the concave bend may have been seen as a convex bend, a
protrusion, of the sea, not the coast. All this makes the
correspondence between gji and sinus remarkable, sure, but it could
all belong to IE already - in which case it need have happened only
once.
I know of no examples at all of Latin loanwords with s- turning up
in Albanian with gj-. Are there appealing candidates?
Now that I'm at it: I would derive Alb. gjarpër from *sérp-n.no-
(dissimilated from *sérp-m.no-), a thematicized derivative from a
verbal noun in *-men- like Greek stémma => stéphanos 'wreath', Latin
vi:men 'osier' (*wéyH1-mn.) => Hitt. wiyana- 'vine' (*wéyH1-n.no-).
The two post-consonantal allomorphs seem to be distributed according
to root structure, *-n.no- being used after roots containing a
labial, while *-m.mo- is unmarked, and the full form *-mno- is used
after a vowel. Since a sonant nasal become Albanian /a/, the first
change is to something like *z^érpana which would certainly produce
gjarpër//gjarpën. Latin serpent- is no sufficient basis for positing
IE *-eno-.
Jens