41: Part one of miscellaneous etymological and pre-IE discussions

 

By Linden Alexander Pentecost. Published on the 29^th of August 2024 in the UK (as is all my work) and only on www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk. This article/page contains: Introduction; The Pacaas Novos language and some etymologies; 3 Cornish etymologies and comments; Comments on Cockney English and the possible prehistoric origins of the Pearly Kings & Queens; References:. This article (the one in front of you) contains 1936 words.

 

(Note that this article (the one in front of you) also contains entirely different content from another article on this website, titled: 8: the West Cornish language, Kernôwek - 1813 words.)

(Note also that this article (the one currently in front of you) is just the most recent in a long series of publications about these subjects, this article (the one currently in front of you) was written to publish a few of those miscellaneous topics which I had not known where to put elsewhere.

 

Introduction

 

This article contains some discussions on topics pertaining to etymology and ancient pre-IE language which I have not known where to publish, so I have decided to discuss these three topics in this one article, it can be considered a collection of discussions on words which have not found a place elsewhere in my publications. This article will likely be the first of several “miscellaneous etymological and pre-IE discussions” articles posted on www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk, the material in none of which will appear or has appeared before in other publications. Note that “pre-IE” in the title means “pre-Indo-European”.

 

The Pacaas Novos language and some etymologies

The Pacaas Novos language is also known as the Wari’ language, Wari’ or wariʔ as given in source (1) being the word in this language which means “person” or “human being”. Thus the language means “language of the people”. This is similar to how the Navajo language is often known as Diné bizaad – literally “mankind its-language”. Pacaas Novos is a member of the Chapacuran language family, spoken in parts of Brazil and Bolivia, and primarily in the Amazonian region. Pacaas Novos has an unusual VOS, or verb-object-subject word order, and certainly from the little that I understand of the grammar, it is indeed quite uniquely different to that of other languages I have studied to some extent from the Amazonian region.

On the etymologies of the Pacaas Novos language, several struck me as particularly interesting from the perspective of my own explorations into etymologies, particularly with regard to connections between indigenous American languages and those that I am familiar with in other parts of the world. Below are 5 Pacaas Novos etymologies listed, all from source (1) of this article.

 

1). meteʔ – worm (1), perhaps linked to Finnish mato – worm, which makes this potential link extremely interesting. Also related to Estonian madu – worm; Veps mado – worm etc. This is especially interesting considering my many other publications regarding connections between South American (particularly Quechuan) languages and Finnish, and considering my ongoing research that connects "worms" and "serpents" to creator beings in our world folk religions.

2). wariʔ – person (1). This word bares some close similarity to a root found in various African, Indo-European and other languages, meaning “man” or “person”, compare for example Lithuanian vyras – man, Irish fear – man, Old English wær – man, to give a few examples from Indo-European.

3). pana – tree (1). This word shows perhaps some similarity to Finnish puu – “tree” and to related Uralic root forms.

4). tašiʔ - to know (1). This word shows some similarity to Finnish tietää – ”to know”, and also to Arawak/Locono aditti or aici – “to know”, please see the article posted below for where I discuss the original connection between the Arawak and Finnish word, and many others:

https://www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk/website-articles-30-45/34-arawak-and-bird-language

5). šina – sun (1). This shows a clear similarity to English “sun” and also to Proto-Afro-Asiatic *san-aw- “shine” or “day” (2), compare also Komi-Zyrian шонді, šondi – “sun”.

 

I will publish a few more Pacaas Novos words and etymological notes in the future. An example of an Afro-Asiatic language connection is also given in the next section of this article. Note also that soon an article of mine will likely be published in Silly Linguistics, in which I talk about some Finnish and Quechua similarities, titled: An ancient temple, languages in the Bock sa-ga, and some similarities between Finnish and Quechua (with temple photo): part one of: “The mystical nature of Finnish & of language in Finland”. Both the aforementioned article and the one you are currently reading, pertain in part to different aspects of my ongoing research on these etymological studies, other important aspects of which I have previously published in separate books.

 

Note that in the July 2024 edition for Silly Linguistics I also had published an article titled The Komi-Zyrian language, The Talking Golden Idol (with art), and other languages in the Ural Mountains, in which I discussed originally the potential connection between Komi-Zyrian шонді and Proto-Afro-Asiatic root words.

 

3 Cornish etymologies and comments

 

As I have stated previously when talking about Cornish and other Cornish etymologies, I feel that the Cornish language is often mistaken for being entirely “Celtic” when in actuality I feel it preserves and contains within it phonetic, structural and lexical elements that are truly prehistoric in origin. Below are 3 Cornish words etymological discussion after each word. I originally learned these words given in bold from source (3), troilia I learned many years ago when studying Cornish.

 

1. troilia – to turn, likely related to Breton troi – turn and other Brythonic forms. An Indo-European etymology seems unlikely, but there is a curious similarity to the word ”troll” in English, a word which itself I think has a twisting, rolling or turning motion implied. This similarity is more obvious in troilia than in the Breton form troi.

2. weely – a lobster pot. This is quite different from the more well known cowel in Cornish, which can mean a “pot” for catching crabs. I think it possible that this word weely might be related to the word “willow” in English, as in the tree, due to that willow was I believed used to make Cornish lobster pots. However, prehistoric origins of the word weely within Cornwall are also not impossible, owing to that the word “willow” in English appears to be of non-Indo-European origin.

3. tyack – farmer or country dweller, given as tiek in more standard varieties of Cornish. It is tempting to see some similarity between these words and English ”thatch”, Northern English ”thack”. Although the root word being ”thatch” tends to mean ”roof” in most Germanic languages, a connection perhaps cannot be ruled out, due thatching being often a traditional skill in agricultural/farming communities. Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *skk, *swk, *skw/y/ʔ – to cultivate, to hoe and sow (2), might be related, although given the semantic differences this is perhaps unlikely.

 

I will be discussing more Cornish etymologies in the near future. Whilst I think it likely that many words, particularly in so-called “modern” Cornish, are pre-Indo-European in origin, I also think it likely that connections exist within Cornish which do not, at least to the same degree, exist in other Celtic languages. Because I have yet to identify many of these connections, my discussions on Cornish etymologies have so far been somewhat limited. I have also previously discussed some very interesting words in the Cornish dialect of English, some of which do show clear similarities to Afro-Asiatic word forms.

 

 

Comments on Cockney English and the possible prehistoric origins of the Pearly Kings & Queens

I wrote an article once under a pseudonym about the Cockney Dialect of English where I went into detail about the phonology, but I wanted to discuss some other aspects to it here and in a new way. “Cockney” here does not refer to the rhyming slang but to the traditional English as spoken in London. The curious thing about this dialect or group of dialects is that they do seemingly appear out of nowhere, and are in fact quite distinctive from the more well-attested dialects of Kent and Essex.

I personally believe that Cockney English originated in the lowlands and on the islands of the Thames estuary, and may have originally been spoken by an indigenous people with their own identity. As I have discussed before in different words, the Cockney dialect’s phonology bares some similar traits to the phonology of Danish, and I believe it possible that this originated during the Paleolithic, i.e. when Denmark and England were one landmass, with these indigenous features of language, eventually, at some point, becoming what we know as Cockney English. Note that I have discussed connections between languages in Britain and Danish in several places, and this is a complex subject, not by any means limited to the discussion here.

Below this paragraph is an example sentence I wrote in a form of broad Cockney orthography, and below that is the version of the sentence in standard English spelling, to help demonstrate the phonology of Broad Cockney as I understand it. Notes on the exact meanings of these letters will be understandable to native Cockney speakers, however I will discuss them in more detail in the future. Note that for example the comma represents not a glottal stop but indicates what I hear to be a special group of “half-formed”, glottal like consonants, or in the case of w’ this may not be entirely apt. Note also that ë is a schwa.

 

Broad Cockney: aaö woz æëʔ in lë gæraaj wökin wiv Dᶻéyvid, wëy woz tˢaw’in ëbæéʔ aw’ lëyz nyu-w-aëziz bëyin biw’ ne’s t l ëwwd sdéyshn

Standard English: I was out in the garage working with David, we were talking about all these new houses being build next to the old station

 

Although not given in the example above, the letter ʞ is used for a special kind of “glottal stop” or “glottal closure” that occurs for standard English “k”. For example, standard English “shark” would be written sha.ʞ. This is not the same as the glottal stop in æëʔ. Nor is it the same as the glottal stop equivalent to “p” in standard English, which occurs in Cockney in for example the word “up”, where I would write the glottal stop-like sound here with the letter ꝑ, thus the word “up” I would write as ăꝑ.

.

Another thing I have learned about recently with regards to Cockney culture is the “Pearly Kings & Queens”. This refers to the traditional symbolic clothing worn on certain occasions by men and women who speak Cockney and are connected to Cockney culture. Whilst these forms of clothing have undergone transformations, they do, in my opinion, look like ceremonial tribal clothing. Considering that the ancient ancestors of the Cockney people likely lived in low-lying, coastal marsh areas, and would likely have eaten a lot of seafood, and, considering that this exists today in Cockney cuisine; could it be possible that the “Pearly Kings & Queens” came from an indigenous symbolic dress tradition, associated with the ancestors of the Cockney people and their ancient connections with the sea and water? Perhaps.

 

I hope that this miscellaneous article (the first of these articles to be posted on this website) was an interesting read:

 

References:

 

(1): Misión Nuevas Tribus. 2023. Pacaas Novos dictionary.
In: Key, Mary Ritchie & Comrie, Bernard (eds.)
The Intercontinental Dictionary Series.
Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
(Available online at http://ids.clld.org/contributions/286, Accessed on 2024-08-29.)

(2): Proto-Afro-Asiatic vocabulary by Alexander Militarev, and Olga Stolbova, vocabulary items were sourced from starlingdb.org by Sergei Starostin.

(3): Tavas a Ragadazow: the language of my forefathers, by Richard Gendall, published in the year 2000.