The CBB

Imralu wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 06:36

k1234567890y wrote: ↑19 Jul 2018 22:02 Chinese 車 and English wheel, it is possible that the Chinese word was ultimately a borrowing from a word for wheel from Indo-European languages

Posts like this would be more interesting if you include the pronunciation.

It’s chē [ʈʂʰɤ˥] in Mandarin.

Imralu wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 06:36

k1234567890y wrote: ↑19 Jul 2018 22:02 Chinese 車 and English wheel, it is possible that the Chinese word was ultimately a borrowing from a word for wheel from Indo-European languages

Posts like this would be more interesting if you include the pronunciation.

And the translation. Bing thinks it means “car”.
They also gave a pronunciation, which I don’t feel competent to write down. But it’s not the one GrandPiano just gave — I think.

Neither pronunciation sounds anything like “wheel”; so I’d also like to know; how do we know these are cognates? Or, what’s the evidence, and how probable is it, that they are cognates?

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 07:02

Imralu wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 06:36

k1234567890y wrote: ↑19 Jul 2018 22:02 Chinese 車 and English wheel, it is possible that the Chinese word was ultimately a borrowing from a word for wheel from Indo-European languages

Posts like this would be more interesting if you include the pronunciation.

And the translation. Bing thinks it means “car”.
They also gave a pronunciation, which I don’t feel competent to write down. But it’s not the one GrandPiano just gave — I think.

Bing isn't wrong here; 車 more generically means "vehicle", but is very commonly understood to mean "car", as in 開車 kāi chē {drive (a car)}.

Znex wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 07:12

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 07:02

k1234567890y wrote: ↑19 Jul 2018 22:02 Chinese 車 and English wheel, it is possible that the Chinese word was ultimately a borrowing from a word for wheel from Indo-European languages

And the translation. Bing thinks it means “car”.
They also gave a pronunciation, which I don’t feel competent to write down. But it’s not the one GrandPiano just gave — I think.

Bing isn't wrong here; 車 more generically means "vehicle", but is very commonly understood to mean "car", as in 開車 kāi chē {drive (a car)}.

True, but in its sense of "wheeled machine", it is often translated as "wheel":

紡車 fǎngchē - spinning wheel
水車 shuǐchē - water wheel/waterwheel
風車 fēng chē - windmill, but also pinwheel
but
滑車 huáchē - pulley

As for GrandPiano's IPA transcription [ʈ͡ʂʰɤ˥], that is the way it's done to describe the pronunciation Bing gives for modern Mandarin; [t͡sʰɛː˥] in modern Cantonese.

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 07:02Neither pronunciation sounds anything like “wheel”; so I’d also like to know; how do we know these are cognates? Or, what’s the evidence, and how probable is it, that they are cognates?

I'll leave that to k1234567890y to address, since I don't know.

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 07:02Neither pronunciation sounds anything like “wheel”; so I’d also like to know; how do we know these are cognates? Or, what’s the evidence, and how probable is it, that they are cognates?

Well, I haven't done any research on the Chinese, but "chakra" is also a cognate of "wheel", so there's some connection with initial palatal sounds.

Dormouse559 wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 08:24 Well, I haven't done any research on the Chinese, but "chakra" is also a cognate of "wheel", so there's some connection with initial palatal sounds.

Well, that's fun. The Wikipedia article on "Chakra" links chakra etymologically to wheel, according to Frits Staal. Link chakra चक्र (च is sometimes pronounced as [t͡sə] or [t͡s] in addition to [t͡ʃə] or [t͡ʃ] - Wikipedia) to Chinese che (pronunciations discussed above), and you're off and running.

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 07:02 Neither pronunciation sounds anything like “wheel”; so I’d also like to know; how do we know these are cognates? Or, what’s the evidence, and how probable is it, that they are cognates?

Isn't the point of this thread for the cognates posted to not be obvious?

shimobaatar wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 15:15 Isn't the point of this thread for the cognates posted to not be obvious?

Of course!
But that doesn’t require the poster thereof to keep the shared ancestor-word a mystery, nor the divergent derivations from that most recent common ancestor.
It only requires that most readers couldn’t easily or quickly figure it out for themselves.

I’m not asking that every poster always make a habit of posting the shared ancestor, much less the diverging etymologies.
(I did ask k1-90y to post that for this one pair. )

But most members of this bboard probably don’t read traditional Chinese script nor read nor speak Mandarin.
So when one member of a pair of cognates is written in Chinese script, I ask that its meaning and sound also be posted.
I’ll go a step further, and ask that, here on this thread in the English section of the CBB, any non-English word in a pair (or larger set) of cognates, be posted with its gloss and its pronunciation.
IMO that won’t usually destroy the non-obviousness of the posted example.

I’d ask for the etymologies only if the words had no apparent semantic similarity and also no apparent phonetic similarity.

What do you say? Would that be OK?


——————————

BTW Thanks, Znex, Lao Kou, Dormouse559, shimobaatar, and anyone else I forgot. I learned something!

According to Wiktionary, 車 is reconstructed as /*[t.qʰ](r)A/ or /*kʰlja/ in Old Chinese (in the first one, the brackets indicate uncertain value and the parentheses indicate uncertain presence). If I remember correctly, it's thought to possibly be a Tocharian borrowing, so either from Tocharian A "kukäl" or Tocharian B "kokale", both of which come from PIE *kʷékʷlos, which also gave English "wheel".

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑21 Jul 2018 06:34 But most members of this bboard probably don’t read traditional Chinese script nor read nor speak Mandarin.
So when one member of a pair of cognates is written in Chinese script, I ask that its meaning and sound also be posted.
I’ll go a step further, and ask that, here on this thread in the English section of the CBB, any non-English word in a pair (or larger set) of cognates, be posted with its gloss and its pronunciation.

Ah, of course. I somehow missed that that's what sparked all this. My apologies.

sorry for the late...;-;

In Old Chinese, the word 車 was possibly pronounced as /*kʰlja/ or /kla/ or something similar, and there's a theory that the word was borrowed from an Indo-European language due to the spread of horseriding and chariots(chariots are associated with the domestication of horse), and thus ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kʷekʷlóm, *kʷékʷlos, *kʷékʷléh₂. Think of this: *kʷékʷléh₂ >(loss of laryngeals) *kʷékʷlá >(loss of labialization) keklá >(the drop of unstressed vowels) klá

For the English part, it is an inherent word instead of a loanword. The English word is from Proto-Germanic *hwehwlą, *hweulō, which is in turn from Proto-Indo-European *kʷekʷlóm, *kʷékʷlos, *kʷékʷléh₂

I guess kind of:

Welsh: car, meaning "car", from Proto-Celtic *karros, "wagon", from PIE *ḱr̥sós, "vehicle"
English: car, from Anglo-Norman carre, from Latin carrus, "four wheeled wagon", from Gaulish karros, from Proto-Celtic *karros, "wagon".

It seems the Welsh word car just meant "wagon", but was likely influenced by the almost identical word car in English. It doesn't seem to be a borrowing from English at all.

They seem, rather, to have come from related Celtic roots. The English “car” took a detour through Latin and a Romance language —— or so it appears.

So car/car belongs in the false cognates thread, not tge surpriding cognates thread.

They are not false cognates; according to sangi39's post, they are indeed cognates, from Proto-Celtic *karros. They're surprising cognates in the sense that the direction of borrowing is the opposite of what would be expected, i.e. it was borrowed from Celtic to English rather than English to Welsh. Plus the fact that despite having very different evolutionary paths, they both ended up as "car".

clawgrip wrote: ↑25 Jul 2018 01:51 They are not false cognates; according to sangi39's post, they are indeed cognates, from Proto-Celtic *karros. They're surprising cognates in the sense that the direction of borrowing is the opposite of what would be expected, i.e. it was borrowed from Celtic to English rather than English to Welsh. Plus the fact that despite having very different evolutionary paths, they both ended up as "car".

I would like to and Gaelic <cat> though there the path is more complicated; The Gaelic terms are Latin borrowings, and the English is Germanic; It is unclear whether Latin borrowed from PGrm or vice versa. I would have thought that given <Gato> that the Gaelic words were borrowings from English, with Grimm's law (Though then Cat should be Cath, and HG soundshifts would be /kat/ not /kats/).

GrandPiano wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 07:02

Imralu wrote: ↑20 Jul 2018 06:36

k1234567890y wrote: ↑19 Jul 2018 22:02 Chinese 車 and English wheel, it is possible that the Chinese word was ultimately a borrowing from a word for wheel from Indo-European languages

Posts like this would be more interesting if you include the pronunciation.

It’s chē [ʈʂʰɤ˥] in Mandarin.

Oddly, Mandarin borrowed <Car> as kǎ /kʰa˧˩˧/ as in kǎchā /kʰa˧˩˧tʂʰa˥/ "Truck", meaning that we have a Chinese multisyllbic word word made up entierly of IE elements(!).
<Kǎ> with the same Hanzi, also is a borrowing of <Card>. So <Kǎpiàn> /kʰa˧˩˧pʰjan˥˩/ "Identification Card" is Cognate to <Chart>!
Also, Palestinian /məwʕid/ "appointment" /moʊʔeɪd/ "Festival; esp. intermidiate days of Passover and Sukkot". I wouldn't have reliezed this, if not for the fact that a. the Tiberian pronounciation of the word is /mowʕed/, and b. it is used in the Modern fashion as an extended sense in the Bible for the core meaning of "set time", and the only examples I can think of the core meaning being used are Psalms 104:14 and Lamentations 1:15, (Thus the symantic narrowing by Mishnaic times, which effected Ben Yehudah) and those verses were on my mind when I learnt the word.

Shemtov wrote: ↑25 Jul 2018 07:30Oddly, Mandarin borrowed <Car> as kǎ /kʰa˧˩˧/ as in kǎchā /kʰa˧˩˧tʂʰa˥/ "Truck", meaning that we have a Chinese multisyllbic word word made up entierly of IE elements(!).

Huh, I never thought about that. That's pretty neat. (It's chē, not chā, though.)

cantaloupe vs. hen and wolf.
The melon is named after the Italian town of Cantalupo "Singing Wolf", and if you trace the IE roots back, the Germanic reflexes are Hen Wolf.
Also, I guess Chant, Hen.

Shemtov wrote: ↑30 Jul 2018 21:18 cantaloupe vs. hen and wolf.
The melon is named after the Italian town of Cantalupo "Singing Wolf", and if you trace the IE roots back, the Germanic reflexes are Hen Wolf.
Also, I guess Chant, Hen.

I looked up in Wiktionary, and you are right.

both of Chant and Hen are from PIE *keh₂n- "to sing", so hens might originally meant "something that sings" in pre-Proto-Germanic.