Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 March 27

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March 27

Is the root of damn the babylonian damu; and the root of ritual the Indian ritu?

I recently read said claim in an an online version of the magazine Herizons, and was wondering if the claim can be verified by another source. Bullets and Bracelets (talk) 21:19, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

The Oxford Dictionary of English traces both to Latin ("damnāre" and "rītuālis" respectively), and mentions nothing about Babylonian or 'Indian' (the latter isn't a language). Because most Indian languages are from the Indo-Aryan language family, along with Latin, it is of course quite possible that something like "ritu" exists in some Indian language, but that doesn't appear to be the origin of the English word (according to OED at least). - Lindert (talk) 22:53, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Ritual comes from a PIE root, *rei- "to count, to number", with cognates in English "read" and Greek "arithmetic". [1] "Damn" probably comes from a PIE root *dap-n- "to apportion (food)", later, "to apportion (blame)" (Mallory & Adams, Oxford Introduction..., p257) which is much more likely to be cognate with Japanese taberu than anything from Sumerian, if that is what is meant by Babylonian. μηδείς (talk) 00:30, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

By ritu Richards' is referring to Sanskrit ऋतुः (ṛtuḥ), which in the Vedas (say, ~1500 BCE) was used for "order" or "the right time"; and, in the Mahabharata (~500BCE) also for "menstrual discharge"; and whose popular contemporary meaning (in Sanskrit and Hindi) is "seasons". And yes, it shares a PIE root with the ritual, arithmetic etc (see [2], [3]). But I have seen no indication that the Sanskrit "word `ritu', meaning menstrual blood, became the root of the word ritual"; more likely that the two are cousins IMO. Abecedare (talk) 12:50, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

References

@WP:RD/L regulars: rather than explaining that anyone who has taken Linguistics 101 would understand why is incorrect, but in terms that require Linguistics 101, how about explaining it in terms that don't require Linguistics 101? Grrr.

(Linguistics 101 wasn't available at no, seriously, there really is a University in Tasmania; and Tasmania is not a fictional place. I've lived there, though that counts as WP:OR, I guess. I auto-didacted up to the level of maybe Linguistics 50.5, and WP:RD/L is my Linguistics MOOC.)

@Bullets and Bracelets: just because words sound the same doesn't mean they are related.

Think back to high school biology, and Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.

A platypus looks and acts a lot like a beaver or an otter. They all live in rivers, they have fur, and so on.

But the platypus lays eggs instead of giving birth to live young. It's of the order Monotremata and is only very distantly related to beavers (ordo Rodentia) and otters (ordo Carnivora)

It's (broadly speaking) the same with languages.

English is an Indo-European language. That's kind of analogous to calling it a species of mammal. (And it just goes all downhill from here. For my next colourful blunder, I'll be describing Semitic languages as amphibians, and the CJKV sprachbund as fish.)

There are lots of mammal species. Think of English as a species of the sub-order Caniformia. English is a West Germanic language. It's a dog, German is a Jackal and Dutch is a fox.

All of those species are closely related to bears. When you next see a picture of a bear, remember what the nose of a Labrador Retriever looks like.

Has this gone some way to answer your question?

Erm... this may also be a very good example of Mansplaining--Shirt58 (talk) 11:20, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

No need to worry. As in the case of Will Rogers, we're all ignorant, only on different subjects. Elementary evolution of mammals, I know some. Elementary evolution of languages, I know less, so for me the analogy works. It won't work for someone who is more ignorant of mammals than I am and less ignorant of, say, the evolution of locomotives. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:34, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Our explanation of Root (linguistics) would need some attention, too. --91.50.28.251 (talk) 14:38, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

• To answer the question as succinctly as possible, the answer in both cases is no. The modern Hindu ritu and the English read, and Greek arithmetic all descend from a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European which was spoken in about 3500-4500BC in the area of the Don river, now in souther Russia. Descendants of these people moved into various areas and became the early Germans (then the English in England) the Greeks and the speakers of Sanskrit and a whole host of other ethnicities with their own languages like Latin and Armenian and Welsh. But English, Greek, and Sanskrit are simply distant cousins, and none of them is descended from the other. As for Babylonian, that is not a language, and it can refer to a place ruled by the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and so forth. But the English damn certainly comes from no such root. μηδείς (talk) 21:55, 28 March 2015 (UTC)