Turandot and the Deep Indo-European Roots of “Daughter” (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Turandot and the Deep Indo-European Roots of “Daughter” (2020)

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

57 pointsdiodorus15 comments

For a nice etymological and mythological rabbit hole down Wikilane I can recommend this gem : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology

Don’t read if you have things to do :)

Our (overqualified) literature teacher in High School taught us this and many other words.

On top of my head, I can think of-

Bhratara (Sanskrit) <--> Brother (English) <--> Bruder (German)

Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)

Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)

Languages in the Indo-European language-family are wildly related, and when learning a new language from this family, if your first language is already in it, then, you often discover links to and from words in languages that you are learning or known or semi-known.

I don't know which one is the root, but in these situations, it is better to think in terms of common ancestor/s rather than upstream or downstream.

thugater (Greek) <--> Tochter (German) <--> Daughter (English)

I've always found it interesting how many different basic words there are for "boy" or "girl" in IE languages. Consider the most common word for "girl" in each language; do any of the following share roots?:

    - jente (Norwegian)
    - pige (Danish)
    - Mädchen (German)
    - stelpa (Icelandic)
    - famke (Frisian)
    - flicka (Swedish)
    - tjej (Swedish, younger girls/more informal, included since it's very frequent)
    - girl (British English and other dialects)
    - lass (Scots English, which might also use quean/quine)

And that's just the Germanic branch …

Most common words stay very stable across language change; this one seems to reinvent itself all the time.

The Francesco Molinari-Pradelli Turandot is available on Pandora. I recommend it for Franco Corelli alone, a great dramatic tenor. We may never see his like again.

https://pandora.app.link/UTGOvF2lNlb

Here's Dame Eva Turner’s massive voice in Turandot’s “In quests reggia”, Act II, Scene II. It's an old recording, but they don't make them like this anymore.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e6SfhUzhO9E

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOt8pfysxc

Huh, I never before made the connection between fellatio and the romance languages words for son/daughter. It’s one of those things that is obvious once it’s pointed out.

so many words have unexpected connections, for example “friend” is related to “freedom”

It's even harder to track in Spanish, since in many of our words we mutated the "f" to a silent "h" (something that didn't happen in Portuguese).

The word may be clearer when you consider the Latin verb for the other participant, irrumare.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

I don't hear any connection with old church Slavonic "dušti" and current "dcéra" (dc is pronounced ts), can anyone shed some light on it?

Edit: Ukrainian have "dochka" so we must have gone away from it.

Look at the accent on "dušti" and remember that š represents Ш https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha_(Cyrillic) . Now in modern Russian/Ukrainian "dochka" is spelled дочка/дочь. The ч is this letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_(Cyrillic) . So not entirely the same but it's not hard to imagine the progression.

Anyhow I wasted my own time but keeping the top half of my comment lol, after clicking through some links:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/d...

and

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Balto-Sl...

Sanskrit lessons should be mandatory for all K-12 students ;)

http://sanskrit-ai.com/

This is very silly. Sanskrit is of great historical linguistic importance. Research on PIE cognates between Sanskrit, Latin and Ancient Greek helped me in my own education. And the language is also useful if you want to read text written in Sanskrit.

But the idea of Sanskrit as a divine language or suited to science/NASA/NLP is just a favorite concept of a certain genre of Indian chauvinist.

The idea of Sanskrit as a programming language is absurd, of course.

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