>I was wondering, since apparently Cz. skopec is a
It was this one that attracted my attention, and then I saw those
other numerous words with close phonetics and meanings. This reminded
me a slangy-dialectal word I heard in my childhood in my dialectal
region: /shklopetz/, with the approx. sense "flibbertigibbet; churl,
simpleton; dumb". I then had thought it must have been some play of
the gab based on a regional and Hungarian word for "hat" (/klop/ &
kalap). Now I realized that those kids must have picked up some
loanword, and that one was perhaps on either Slovak or Czech loanword;
either via Hungarian or from small Czech and Slovak diaspora commu-
nities in my region.
This is why I'd rather expect Pol. szkopec to be something related,
and having nothing in common with Schöffe and Schwab.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wether
>(from skop-iti "castrate")
The "skopiti" once played a role: it was a late sect, in Russian
/skapetz/, in German die Skopzen. But it was a late one: in the
18th century. If Pol. szkopec means the same thing, then forget
about it.
>Yes, the the Phoenician-Hebrew shopet/shofet would have arrived not
>from the west but from the east, from the Bosporan Kingdom, through
>the Bastarnian lands.
But only as an indirect loan or wandering word: via the intermediate:
Turk tchaban (also see the Hungarian name Csaba) and Slav. zhupan.
So, if Bastarnians had a variant of this notion, then presumably
from neighboring Iranic (and later on Turkic) idioms-speaking
populations (e.g. of the Yazygian, Roxolan, Alan kind).
>I haven't seen anything that would force me to divide the word sets
>into the three categories you claim to see. The semantics covers
>something like "judged" / "castrated" / "wether/sheep/herd". It all
>makes sense in a slaving context.
Yes, but how old is the Russian and else Slavic "castrate" notion
skopets? To include this one into the "equation", the word must have
had some ancient link either with shopet or with shaban/chaban.
Otherwise I'm afraid it doesn't work.
George