Thread: "Folk" Etymologies of Russian Words like ЛЮБОВЬ(ЛЮДИ БОГА ВЕДАЮТ)- what do you think?

Throbert, excellent post. You know more about the etymology of English and Russian words than I do - I didn't know that the connection between altar and altus was false.
I don't think Sibiryak is trolling - that would be a lot of effort to put into a troll post, and either way, I've met plenty of Russians in Russia who legitimately believe in this kind of thing.

Originally Posted by MarkRWayne

Throbert, excellent post. You know more about the etymology of English and Russian words than I do

Believe me I didn't know all the details off the top of my head! I can remember that my high school Latin teacher was always telling us to beware of ложные друзья like "to occupy" and occupare, and he once gave us the example of "altare does not come from altus" to show that these false cognates can occur even within the same language. But I had to look up -- just now, when I was writing my post -- what the real etymology was.

And for my part, I had no idea that Arabic al-maas was related to Greek adamos -- I assumed that maas was native to Arabic. But it makes sense now that I think about it, because medieval Arabs translated such an enormous number of ancient Greek manuscripts, and it would hardly be surprising if some medieval scribe mistook the Greek negative prefix a- ("not") for the Arabic article al.

P.S. The Latin occupare can indeed mean "to occupy", but only in the specific sense of "annexation by military siege". So it's a false-friend in other senses.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

And for my part, I had no idea that Arabic al-maas was related to Greek adamos -- I assumed that maas was native to Arabic. But it makes sense now that I think about it, because medieval Arabs translated such an enormous number of ancient Greek manuscripts, and it would hardly be surprising if some medieval scribe mistook the Greek negative prefix a- ("not") for the Arabic article al.

I actually didn't know this either (and it could be wrong) - I found it on Wiktionary. That is where I usually go for quick etymology references, since it usually draws from reputable sources like Vasmer.

Originally Posted by MarkRWayne

I don't think Sibiryak is trolling - that would be a lot of effort to put into a troll post

To make my meaning more clear, I didn't intend to say that the entire post was a troll -- I was reacting to Sibiriak's apparent suggestion that the Internet slang «ник» has the smallest bit of connection to the -ник in "тайник"! (After all, the correct etymology is not a matter of much mystery or controversy --the Runet term was borrowed directly from the already-existing English computer slang "nick," which was in use on dial-up forums like Compuserve and AOL even in the late 1980s, before there was a World Wide Web. The computer slang "nick," in turn, was a shortening of "nickname," which has roots all the way back to Old English.)

Admittedly, I also found it a bit strange that a native Russian speaker would "break" the word тайник into тай/ник (i.e. instead of тайн/ик or possibly тай/н/ик ). And even if one divides it as тай/ник, the first part has a rather obvious connection to the verb таить -- a pan-Slavic term which has denoted the concept of "secrecy" since ancient times. So if you're a native speaker of a Slavic language, there's no need to go looking for "evidence" that тай- really means "место, местность", as Sibiriak suggested. (On the other hand, there is some evidence that this Slavic root meaning "secret, mysterious, hidden" is linked with an ancient Hindustani root meaning вор, "thief".)

It reminded me just a bit of a quotation from Mr. Mrs. Garrison on South Park: "Darwin's godless theory of so-called evolution states that a long time ago, a fish had butt-sex with a squirrel and gave birth to a retarded fish-squirrel, and the retarded baby fish-squirrel grew up and had sex with a monkey. Which means that you kids are the retarded offspring of gay monkeys who had butt sex with mutant fish-squirrels."

P.S. Mind you, EVERYTHING sooner or later reminds me of a quotation from South Park.

Mark: I know essentially zero about Arabic, but a friend who's "natively bilingual" in English and Arabic once explained to me that Arabic is so overwhelmingly based on "triconsonant roots" that when you encounter an Arabic word-root with more than three consonants (like shawarma, a.k.a. "doner kebab" or "gyros", with the four consonants SH-W-R-M), or only two consonants, it's usually safe to bet money that the word is of non-Arabic origin. (There's only a tiny handful of native Arabic roots in which the number of consonants isn't three.) Since maas, "diamond", has only two consonants, that could support the idea that the word was actually a corruption of a borrowed Greek term. (And the word shawarma, incidentally, was borrowed into Arabic from a Turkish verb meaning "rotate.")

P.S. My Arabic-speaking friend also happened to be an ex-Muslim apostate/atheist, so his short explanation about triconsonant roots related more broadly to the significance of non-Arabic borrowings in the Koran. Suffice to say that some non-Muslim scholars have pointed to such borrowings as evidence that certain passages in the Koran may have been "plagiarized" from Christian or Jewish source texts.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Mark: I know essentially zero about Arabic, but a friend who's "natively bilingual" in English and Arabic once explained to me that Arabic is so overwhelmingly based on "triconsonant roots" that when you encounter an Arabic word-root with more than three consonants (like shawarma, a.k.a. "doner kebab" or "gyros", with the four consonants SH-W-R-M), or only two consonants, it's usually safe to bet money that the word is of non-Arabic origin. (There's only a tiny handful of native Arabic roots in which the number of consonants isn't three.) Since maas, "diamond", has only two consonants, that could support the idea that the word was actually a corruption of a borrowed Greek term. (And the word shawarma, incidentally, was borrowed into Arabic from a Turkish verb meaning "rotate.")

P.S. My Arabic-speaking friend also happened to be an ex-Muslim apostate/atheist, so his short explanation about triconsonant roots related more broadly to the significance of non-Arabic borrowings in the Koran. Suffice to say that some non-Muslim scholars have pointed to such borrowings as evidence that certain passages in the Koran may have been "plagiarized" from Christian or Jewish source texts.

Throbert, your knowledge about Arabic sounds very good (while you say you know zero about Arabic)
But i just wanna add a tiny little thing; that the main word "Adamas" was from Greek orgin, Then it came to "Farsi/Persian" with a new form --> "Mas"
And Then it went from Farsi/Persian to Arabic with this form --> "Almas"
However we use 'Almas' mainly in Farsi nowadays, too.