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Re:Early Europeans Ate Seaweed for Thousands of Years
by cmrdporcupine on Thursday October 19, 2023 @12:28PM
(#37945007)
Yeah see my edit, it seems clear to me that the bʰleh₃- is the origin, and Latin never got the dʰelh₁- derivation.
Re:Early Europeans Ate Seaweed for Thousands of Years
by chupasaurus on Thursday October 19, 2023 @11:59PM
(#37952245)
It sounds OK to me if dʰelh went through some thenanigans to Latin. Fun fact: zelen is one of common roots in Slavic languages for green/leafs.
Re:Early Europeans Ate Seaweed for Thousands of Years
by thaumasiotes on Friday October 20, 2023 @09:40AM
(#37955830)
Comparing this other comment:
> Note that phonetically dulce in NI would be pronounced "dulis."
is interesting in that the modern pronunciation looks much closer to the ancient pronunciation than the modern spelling is to either. What happened?
Re:Early Europeans Ate Seaweed for Thousands of Years
by cmrdporcupine on Friday October 20, 2023 @12:25PM
(#37958197)
I am not an Irish (or any kind of Celtic) speaker but orthography for those languages looks absolutely crazy to me. Both Welsh and Irish / Scottish Gaelic look like languages that might have benefited from their own alphabet, or at least the addition of some diacritical marks.
We also have no real idea how proto-Celtic or even Gaulish or early old Irish would have been pronounced. Only best guesses. We have inscriptions in e.g Gaulish from Roman times but they look to me suspiciously Latinized.
And then look at English.. it's a mismash of a bunch of different orthograpic conventions -- Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Nordic, Latin, Greek... and makes no sense. Even us native speakers have no absolute certainty how to pronounce a word they've never seen before.
From Old Irish duilesc (compare Scottish Gaelic duileasg), from Proto-Celtic doliskos, duliskos (compare Welsh delysg), from Proto-Indo-European dʰelh₁- (“to bloom, be green”) (compare duille (“leaf”)).
Whereas Latin 'dulcis' comes from PIE dl̥kús ("sweet")
Actually probably cognate with Latin 'folium' (Italian foglia, French 'feuille'). EDIT: Actually no. Not sure there's a Latin cognate at all; the dʰelh₁ PIE doesn't seem to have evolved to "Leaf" in Latin and the Greek word for "bloom" was borrowed instead? Something like that.