Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 March 29

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March 29

"Moon" in Slavic languages

Slavic vocabulary shows that "Moon" is one of very few Swadesh list-based words that differs across these languages (most have месяц or its variation, while Russian and Bulgarian have луна, which is more surprising when other similar concepts are compared - sun, sky, star, etc). Is it known why and/or when approximately did such deviation occur?

For some reason, moon and luna show that Proto-Indo-European had two words for "moon" - *mḗh₁n̥s and *lówksneh₂ which is perplexing - in that case it seems that most Slavic languages, as well as English, followed the *mḗh₁n̥s pattern, while Russian and Bulgarian, as well as Romance languages, followed the *lówksneh₂ pattern via Latin luna. Brandmeister^talk 17:53, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Latin and the Romance languages use mensis for "month" and luna for "moon", much as modern Russian does. Both words are present in early Slavic texts: looking at Luke 21:25, you can find "luna" in the Dobreyshovo Gospels (Bulgaria, 13c) and "mesjats" in Codex Zographensis. It doesn't seem too surprising that several languages that originally had multiple words available for "moon" or "month" have narrowed the semantic range of each one make a distinction between the heavenly body and its associated cycle in time.--Amble (talk) 19:48, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

I would expect Proto-Slavic language to have a single (or at least primary) word for "moon", just like for PIE, though I'm not sure. Does it mean that PIE and PSL had two equally common words for "moon", that later became templates for other languages? Brandmeister^talk 20:16, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

PIE certainly had the two words — you mentioned them yourself, mḗh₁n̥s and lówksneh₂. I don’t know about ‘’equally common’’, or whether they had identical semantic range in PIE, but each was common enough to leave commonly used descendants in many languages. —Amble (talk) 20:53, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

So both Russian dom and luna are cognates to Latin that happen to look very similar. Interesting. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:25, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the Latin phrase Romani ite domum in Russian would be римляне, идите домой!, which sounds pretty similar. —Amble (talk) 17:11, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Brandmeister -- For a comparable case, there are two separate Proto-Indo-European stems which can mean "wheel": stem 1 and stem 2. Both stems are present in Germanic languages: English "wheel" and German "Rad", etc. AnonMoos (talk) 01:45, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks all. Brandmeister^talk 07:48, 30 March 2024 (UTC)