Re: Brugmann's Law

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 51377
Date: 2008-01-18

OK
Another bristly word to bring out your swears --
Where does Latin quaerere "to seek, desire" come from?
It superficially looks as if it should be related to
other desire words.
This also brings up the <wh> or /hw/ of whore --is it
an affected spelling or the real thing. The word is
never pronounced as /hw/ AFAIK and the dialect forms
I'm aware of are /hu@.../ and /ho?/ --unless there's
some obscure Scots form such as *hwuwr, *hwyr, *fyr or
the like


--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> On 2008-01-18 02:53, Rick McCallister wrote:
>
> > kura (sp?) is obviously related to English whore,
> ho
> > and German hure
>
> This is unlikely, despite the similarity. The
> (pan-)Slavic word is
> <kurva>, apparently continuing an older *u: stem
> (*kury/*kurUve). The
> Germanic one, *xo:ro:(n-) seems to go back to
> *kah2-ro- (cf. ca:rus,
> Skt. ka:ma-). There's no way of deriving Slavic
> *kury from this root
> (Slavic *u normally comes from older *ou/*au). If it
> were not for the
> initial, I'd suspect a borrowing from Germanic (as
> others have done),
> but that would surely have given Slavic *xury.
>
> Vasmer suggests *kury was an old feminine derivative
> of *kurU 'cock,
> rooster' originally meaning 'hen' (now generally
> replaced by <kura,
> kurica>). He gives the pair *svek(U)rU : *svekry as
> the model (it's
> hardly a productive pattern, but *-u: stems are
> common among bird's
> names). I am not sure what to make of the word.
> Every time I think about
> its etymology, I feel like saying it (as an
> expletive, it is used in
> Polish to express chagrin or frustration, rather
> like Eng. f***!).
>
> Piotr
>
>



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