Post 2,222

BTW, if any of you are wondering why I set the birth year in my profile to "1896" when I'm clearly quite a few years younger than that (or else Dorian Gray), I was driven to it by the tediousness of having to click through a page on every single entry by f8nbegorra, fogbear, and others due to the clumsy-ass implementation of dubious "protections" by Your LJ Team several weeks back. For reasons of privacy, I don't want my actual birth year to display (if it matters to you, I was conceived about the same time as All My Children) so I began by inputting "1" and kept increasing the the figure until LJ would accept it. Apparently, the thought of a 112 year-old online is plausible to them but not a 142 year-old. (If anyone wants to discover what the precise cut-off is, be my guest.)

I wanted to do something cute involving twoness for this entry, but nothing came to mind beyond a discussion of the dual number in Irish. Never got around to that, obviously, but maybe I'll save my thoughts for the day aadroma tackles grammatical number as a Multilingual Monday topic. Now, with that monkey off my back, I'll post again about food and feasting. Huzzah!

Adventskranz und Christbaumstern sind tot

The one compensation as a bid farewell to the merry holiday season (on a most un-Christmassy 60-degree evening) is the thought that another two-week period of feasts and revels kicks off in one month to the day with the arrival of the Year of the Rat.

Cassoulet was eaten. In case it wasn't rich enough, we bracketed it with cream of roasted cauliflower as a starter and a dessert of hot chocolate with monshu's famous roscón de Reyes. Believe it or not, this was actually a less rich meal than the one I had chez Umm `At̤ā'ullāh the night before. My fresh-baked wheat bread laid with smoked and unsmoked cheese actually shrank to the status of an appetiser after course followed by course of gingerbread, black bun (well, not really, but I'm not allowed to call it "fruitcake"), and galette de Rois (which I continued to nosh on long after the almond had been found) washed down with wassail and port.

It was a small gathering but a deeply interesting one. We explained the mysteries of Catholic upbringing to non-Catholics, complete with illustrative jokes (monshu's "What are the three things that even God doesn't know?" was such a hit that notes were taken), not to mention the mysteries the Chinese writing system, Italian tax codes, and Irish politics. I had considered meeting Nuphy at Bear Night afterwards to celebrate the new smoke-free regime in Chicago, but the opportunity came and I felt no need to move on. Instead of staying up to the wee hours making small-talk with near-strangers, I stayed up to the wee hours having good conversation with old friends. What better note to end the season on?

I meant to dismantle the token presence of Christmas in my apartment this afternoon, but I couldn't bring myself to. Clearing away the Christmas candles means beginning the cleaning in preparation for Chinese New Year and I'm not ready to face that quite yet. O spare me, please, until snow is falling again and the prospect of venturing outside for shopping or visiting is less enticing.

Oh *bhreh²ter-, where art thou?

The cognate sets for "mother", "father", "brother", "sister", and "daughter" are popular in introductions to the concept of Proto-Indo-European because this "core vocabulary" is so consistently preserved in the daughter languages. But just because a lexeme persists doesn't mean its original meaning does.

I learned this lesson anew when writing this entry in Irish. Based on those lists of kinship terms, I reached for mo bhráthair when I needed to translate "my brother". But in Modern Irish, bráthair is used solely in to refer to clergy and the usual term for "male sibling" is deartháir.

Irish is hardly unique among European languages in this respect. The same is true in Italian, for instance, where the direct descendants of Latin frater and soror (respectively frate and suora) persist only in religious titles and the terms siblings are presently known by are diminutive in origin (e.g. fratello < Latin fratellus "little brother").

In Ibero-Romance, the words for "brother" are derived from germanus, originally an adjective meaning "of the same parents". This distinction may have been necessary not so much because remarriage was rife but because frater also had the meaning "father's brother's son" (frater patruelis), i.e. a kind of first cousin.

So what is the origin of Irish deartháir (and its female counterpart, deirfiúr)? When I learned that genitive of deartháir is dearthár, it tripped my suspicions that there was some sort of relationship to bráthair after all, since that's a form of declension that's--as far as I know--limited to the PIE kinship terms.

A look at my (Scots) Gaelic dictionary turned up dearbh-bhráthair as a term for "blood brother" (as opposed to stepbrother, foster brother, etc.); the element dearbh has the meaning "actual, true". The exact phonetic developments are unclear to me--dearbh-bhráthair contracted to *dearáthair and thence, by metathesis, to deartháir?

The story is much clearer with deirfiúr, which would represent a regular outcome of *dearbh-shiúr: Irish sh is pronounced [h] which would merge with and devoice preceding [v] [spelled bh], yielding [f]. The only snag seems to be that I can't find evidence of this pronunciation in any dialect!

In Munster, you have metathesis of unstressed dear- to drea-, but this is a regular process in the dialect (cf. turas "journey" > trus). The broad nature of the /f/ is probably explained by the fact that most Munster dialects seem not to distinguish broad and slender /h/, so the change would've been /dʲarv/ + /sʲu:r/ > */dʲarv'hu:r/ (rather than */dʲarv'hʲu:r/) > /drʲa'fu:r/.

But I'm at a loss to explain what happens in Cois Fhairrge, where the pronunciation is /'drʲaur/. If I had to phoneticise this, I'd use the respelling *dreabhar, but Ó Siadhail inexplicably prefers driofúr, which is neither Caighdeán Oifigiúil nor reflects the dialect pronunciation.