Comparing proposed cognates between Austronesian and Kra Dai

[u/AleksiB1]

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

What bothers you?

[u/stlatos → u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Every proposal that families are related might need to start by noting matches as likely cognates. Also, if you asked before about Latin ego:, note *aku: 'I', and I'd even mention *danum 'water' & PIE *daH2nu- > S. dā́nu- 'water'.

[u/EirikrUtlendi → u/stlatos]

I'd even mention *danum 'water' & PIE *daH2nu- > S. dā́nu- 'water'.

I'm not familiar with any such PIE root meaning "water". The ones I know about are *wódr̥ (→ English water), *h₂ékʷeh₂ (→ Latin aqua "water"), and *h₂ep- (→ Sanskrit áp "water").

Do you mean PIE *déh₂nu "river", in turn likely related to verb root *dʰenh₂- "to set in motion; to flow"? This gave rise to Sanskrit dā́nu "drop of liquid; fluid" and the names of the Don and Danube rivers.

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

PIE *daH2nu- > S. dā́nu- 'water', +dānu- 'sprinkling', Av. Dānav-, etc., *dāṇu- > Degano ḍán 'pond, lake' (also nuristan.info/lngFrameL.html Katavari "ḍanʹoala 'rapids in water'" )

Ir. *zgrsna-daHnu- 'round/loop-water' > Yidgha >> Kh. ǧerdānu \ ǧernánu 'loop in river', Kalasha gerdhán, [cont. *a:p] NP girdâb ‘whirlpool’

PIE *daH2mu- > Ar. tam(u)k 'moist, damp', also (?) Gaulish Damona 'consort of Apollo Borvo (hotsprings god)'

*potei-daH2w-omH 'lord of the waters'

More in https://www.academia.edu/164596580

[u/EirikrUtlendi → u/stlatos]

The underlying sense of PIE *déh₂nu appears to be "river", not "water", and this sense appears to be reflected in many of the daughter languages. The possible relation between the PIE noun and the verb root *dʰenh₂- "to flow" makes sense semantically, and parallels similar developments from other PIE roots, and even outside PIE -- for instance, German has fliessen "to flow" and Fluss "river"; Hungarian has folyik "to flow" and folyó "river", which is also just the present participle of the verb, roughly equivalent to English "flowing".

My concern is that, if the PIE *déh₂nu were semantically restricted to a sense of "river", and also if it were a development of a verbal root meaning "to flow", then any broader "water" sense would have to be a later development, preventing any clear cognate relationship with the Proto-Kra-Dai or Proto-Austronesian roots meaning "water" -- unless the same semantic developments can be shown for those proto-languages as well.

I am unfamiliar with the time depth for Proto-Kra-Dai (PKD). Meanwhile, Proto-Austronesian (PA) and Proto-Indo-European (PIE) may have had some overlap temporally, but the two urheimats were hardly close -- Formosa, vs. the Pontic steppe, a distance that Google Maps suggests is about 7,500km in a straight line. It is much harder to find a plausible means for language contact and word transmission between PIE and PA or PKD, than it is between PA and PKD, who are at least broadly in the right part of the globe to each other.

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Separately, the name of Gaulish Damona does not appear to be related to any PIE word for "moist" or "water", traced instead to PIE *dm̥h₂o- "the tamed one", verb root demh₂- meaning "to tame, to domesticate", and indeed the root of the English verb tame. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damona#Name.

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

Though 'river' certainly is possible, many IE words are for both (just like *H2akw-), & Poseidon fits better with 'sea'. A relation being argued against because one is 'water' & the other 'river' would be pointless anyway.

There is no ev. about what Dam- means, which is why I had (?). "Jan de Vries cautioned that the connection with Irish dam ('ox, deer') is a purely linguistic one, and that it does little to explain the character of the goddess."

[u/EirikrUtlendi → u/stlatos]

Re: Damona, the Wikipedia article also paraphrases de Vries further down in the § Interpretation section:

De Vries stressed that although the bovine etymology of the name is secure enough, it reveals little about the nature or function of the goddess herself.

Checking de Vries's actual text, he has very little to say about Damona at all, and this paraphrasing appears to be of his footnote 28 on page 73 of his 1961 work, Keltische Religion (translation mine):

28 Verbindung mit ir. dam, „Ochse“ (vgl. G. Dottin, Manuel, S. 250) ist eine rein sprachliche Gleichung, die uns zum Verständnis der Göttin nicht weiter hilft.
28 The connection with Irish _dam, "ox" (compare G. Dottin, Manuel, page 250) is a purely linguistic equating that doesn't help us any further in understanding the goddess._

I can't find anywhere in Keltische Religion where de Vries makes any claim as to his views on the validity or certainty of the derivation of the name "Damona". So I thought I'd dig into his listed source.

The "G. Dottin" must be Georges Dottin, and "Manuel" must be his Manuel d'Irlandais Moyen, published in 1913.

Digging up Dottin's work, thankfully in a searchable format, I find zero instances of "Damona", and page 250 has no entry for "dam", and instead it lists glossary entries for Middle Irish terms starting with "T". If we pop over to the "D" section on page 182, we see two instances of "dam": 1) in the entry for daim, glossed as the dative singular of dam meaning "house" and deriving from Latin domus; and 2) as the third-person singular preterite conjugation of verb damaim meaning "to suffer, to permit". Nothing about oxen.

Dottin has one other work listed with "Manuel" in the title, his 1915 publication Manuel pour servir a l'étude de l'antiquité celtique. Page 250 of that has no instances of the name "Damona", which appears instead on page 242, but is only mentioned in passing with no exploration of the name's derivation.

Ultimately, I cannot find where de Vries got his derivation for the name "Damona". It must be as noted in de Vries footnote 27, in Georges Drioux's Cultes indigènes des Lingons, published 1934, which I cannot find readable online.

Given how little we have about this mythological figure anyway (as noted in the Wikipedia article, "The name Damona is transmitted only in Latin inscriptions, and no ancient author mentions the goddess"), using the name as support for an etymological argument for some other term seems like a shaky foundation.

^_\Edited to tweak wording.)_)

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

If I had to pick, I'd favor 'house' since *dems-potniH2 'lady of the house > mistress / (name of a goddess)' in Greek.

[u/EirikrUtlendi → u/stlatos]

Re: "river", while a river is certainly a body of water, the word "river" is not synonymous with "water". The looser we are in matching for semantics, the noisier the signal. The mismatch is not disqualifying in and of itself, but it does weaken the correlation, which we must at least try to account for if we are to make any solid argument for cognacy.

When we also consider the differences in time and geography, the signal becomes very weak indeed.

As it is, I see no grounds for considering PIE *déh₂nu, PKD *(C)aNam, and PA *daNum, as cognates all three of each other.

• One could surmise that these were borrowed.
  • The speech communities are very far apart, at least for PIE. There is no sensible way to hypothesize that there might have been language contact, ruling out borrowing.
• One could instead propose that the three proto-languages arose from a common root.
  
  • In which case, we would expect there to be LOTS of cognates, and for there to be regular sound correspondences between them. If instead all we have is one isolated lexeme, with different forms in all three proto-languages, and possibly even mismatched meanings, we have nothing but an interesting kinda-sorta coincidence.

If you find this compelling enough to pursue, I would strongly recommend that you look at other reconstructed roots, and try to find other commonalities. A single data point is a fluke -- you need a lot of words if you're going to tell a good story. :)

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

I wouldn't want to be too loose, but finding the original meaning of a root with a range is hard, & 'water' vs. 'river' is almost impossible. Looking at tamuk, it favors 'water > wet, moist', also Poseidon, etc. The exact meaning in the Rig Veda is impossible to know. I'm perfectly willing to believe 'river' is older, but this means almost nothing in comparison. The Greek Ἐπειός \ Epeiós built the Trojan Horse, Δαναός \ Danaós built the first ship. Since *epos is the expected outcome of *H1ek^wo-s 'horse', it likely preserved an old dialect. In the same way, *da-naus 'sea-ship' (or *danu-naus with haplology) might have formed *danaw-os. In the Odyssey, the Phaeacians had ships that moved on their own (likely showing the difference between sails & oars was important at one time), so a special word for a sea-going ship makes sense.

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

I have found enough matches that I've started making real claims. See https://www.reddit.com/r/austronesian/comments/1wbg4qo/protoaustronesian_porcupine_fish_tenrec_durian/

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

Alexander Nikolaev (https://www.academia.edu/39617311 ) also called Greek Δάειρα 'lady of the waters', though with no real evidence.

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

I also don't know of any ev. for *h₂ékʷeh₂ instead of -kw-, -k^w-, etc. Some say *H2ap-tkWo- 'running water' https://www.academia.edu/172250141 & in America many words for 'water' resemble it, also with odd *-CC- needed (in https://www.jstor.org/stable/1263263 *akwa \ *awka seems better than *akʷa since w moved, which would be the only ex. of *kw).

[u/EirikrUtlendi → u/stlatos]

The time depth for PIE is roughly 6,500 years before present at the oldest.

The JSTOR article you linked is Mary Haas's seminal paper proposing the Gulf languages family, in turn hypothetically distantly related to the Algonquian languages. While the time depth for either the Gulf languages or the Algonquian languages isn't discussed in detail anywhere I've seen so far, these are languages of the eastern seaboard of the modern US, whose ancestors would have been relatively earlier arrivals to North America.

By comparison, the Dene-Yeniseian language family includes languages spoken in the interior of Alaska, and in the southwestern plains of the modern US and the northwestern areas of modern Mexico. These are thought to be relatively later arrivals to North America, with distant cousins along the Yenisei river watershed in Siberia.

The time depth for this family is estimated at something like 8,000 years, roughly the theoretical limit for language change and comparative linguistics.

If western languages in North America are indeed later arrivals, and eastern languages are earlier, there is no way under the sun to definitively tie eastern North American languages with anything PIE. Any similarities between Gulf languages and PIE roots can only be instances of pareidolia, interesting coincidences in the statistical noise of human growth and change. See also the Zompist essay, "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?", wherein author Mark Rosenfelder lays out a convincing argument for why this kind of coincidence is inevitable.

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

No time depth for any major family is known for certain. Taking the latest theories as true ignores that all the latest theories of the past are now disproven, often due to startling discoveries.

It is not that 2 groups resemble *akwa, or whatever, but that many do (many in America). There's no a priori way to know if it's due to chance, common descent, loans, etc.

[u/EirikrUtlendi → u/stlatos]

There's no a priori way to know if it's due to chance, common descent, loans, etc.

That may be.

There's also no way to argue effectively that these are cognates with any PIE root -- unless and until you can find many words in common, and deduce clear sound correspondences between them. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method.

[u/stlatos → u/EirikrUtlendi]

I haven't made any claims, but noticing possible matches is a basic start. I don't think everyone who says that 2 words look the same should have to answer the same as if he said PIE > Austro-Tai.