Eastern Wardrobe

The antique wardrobe shown below belongs to a friend. It is supposed to have been produced in Korea. The inscriptions on it look Chinese. Is any of the readers of this blog able to decipher what it means?

Lower part

Upper part.

Update: I posted the question also on the Zompist board. The result of the discussion was that it seems to be a purely decorative use of Chinese signs, some of which even non-existing, that do not form a meaningful text.

Hittite ḫumant- and Vedic ubhau

I put a paper up for discussion on academia.edu.
Abstract:
A connection between Hittite ḫumant- “all, each, entire” and Vedic ubhau “both” was proposed by Puhvel in his Hittite Etymological Dictionary. He analyses ḫumant- as ḫu- + suffix -want- (PIE -went-). For the first element, he assumes an original meaning “both” and for the lexeme a development “both-having” > “all-having” > “all”.
This paper argues that there is indeed a common element *h2u- in both words, but that it's original meaning was "all".
Readers are cordially invited to join over there or to comment here.

English is the new Latin

Photograph taken in a public park in Tehran in March 2017:

The bird's name is given in three versions - Farsi Tuti touġdār, Scientific Psittacula krameri, and in what is labelled "Latin", but what is clearly English: Rose-ringe parakeet. (And let's just let it slide that there's a typo and the name ought to be written "Rose-ringed parakeet").

Arabic the wrong way around

Doing some housekeeping on my notebook, I found this picture I took in a Warsaw Hotel in Summer 2015. As you can see, it's a multilingual sachet with shaving cream. What drew my attention is the Arabic - the wording is correct (جل للحلاقة, jil li-l-ḥala:qati "gel for shaving"), but the writing is left-to-write instead of right-to-left, and it's not a mirror image, but each Arabic letter is printed left-to-right. I don't think that any human being produced that, picking each letter from an Arabic keyboard and putting them in the wrong order; I suppose that this happened when an automatic text editor was used to put all the different language versions into the template for printing, and the automatic editor applied the same text direction to all alphabets indiscriminately. And then, nobody who knows Arabic checked the outcome. But maybe my readers have a better explanation?

"Alles Kokolores"

(Reposting of my Goodreads Review.)
"Alles Kokolores" is a nice little collection of etymologies and word histories of words that are typical for the Rhine / Ruhr area. Debunks folk etymologies and word myths, like the myth that "Fisimatenten" is a loan from French. Written in a chatty, very intelligible style, and it also doesn't shy away from admitting when the etymology of a word simply isn't known.
Additional note: Kokolores is one of the words discussed, it means "nonsense".

Note on Liberman's Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology

Shortly before the New Year I finished reading Anatoly Liberman's "An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology". This is a copy of my "review" at Goodreads - it's actually more a shot note:

The Lemmata in this dictionary are presented as examples for a detailed analytic dictionary of English etymology. This works very well for the examples, as they are about words with disputed or unclear etymologies. But a printed dictionary based on this format, containing all lemmata included in the existing etymological dictionaries of English, would go into tens of thousands of pages, so I'd be surprised if any publisher would embark on such an endeavor. Maybe something like this could be realized as an Internet resource.

It is also interesting to see the history of proposed etymologies. But I doubt it is necessary to include contemporary proposals by crackpots like Makovskij – if stuff like that is included, where to stop?

Even if the dictionary project never comes to pass, the book is valuable as a collection of etymologies on which there is no current consensus or for which Liberman challenges the consensus.

Additional note: Goodreads commenter Chris alerted me to this recent article on Liberman, which I gladly share here.

Gaulish Stress

This is a re-posting of a comment on Languagehat's blog. In a discussion that somehow moved from a discussion of register differences in Japanese to initial mutations and stress in Celtic (one of the many charms of discussions on that blog), I posted some half-remembered information from Pierre-Yves Lambert, "La Langue Gauloise", Éditions Errance, Paris, 2003 and promised to check and post what I found. So here are (1) the relevant paragraphs in French (from p. 48), (2) an English translation (did it myself, so please point out any mistakes), and (3) a few comments.


(1) L’accent en gaulois
Nous n’avons pas beaucoup d’indices sur l’accent gaulois; quelques formes du latin de Gaule ont un comportement spécial. On a depuis longtemps relevé les deux traitements que présentent les noms des cités gauloises, un accent antépénultième donne Rennes, Bourges, et l’accent pénultième donne Redon, Berry.
Bitúriges > Bourges
Bituríges > Berry
Ainsi Nemausus donne (accent pénultième) Nemours, mais avec accent sur l’antépénultième, Nîmes; Condate donne Condes où Condé, Arelate donee Arles ou Arlet.
Autres exemples de formes accentuées sur l’antépénultième: Caturiges > Chorges, Cambo-ritum (« le gué courbé ») Chambord, Eburovices Evreux, Durocasses Dreux, Bodiocasses Bayeux…    
En fait, les formes avec accent antépénultième ne sont pas celles qui posent problème : on en avait aussi en latin et même en latin tardif (ex. : hóminem > homme). Le problème est de savoir pourquoi certains de ces mots sont devenus accentués sur la pénultième, avec allongement de la voyelle pénultième (Cóndate > Condáte > Condāte > Condé). Il n’est pas sûr que le phénomène remonte vraiment au gaulois : cela peut être dû à des disparités socio-linguistiques dans la société gallo-romaine.

(2) Stress in Gaulish
We don’t have many clues about Gaulish stress; some forms of the Latin of Gaul have a special behavior. One has long noted the two treatments that the names of Gaulish cities present, an antepenultimate stress gives Rennes, Bourges, and the penultimate stress gives Redon, Berry.
Bitúriges > Bourges
Bituríges > Berry
Thus Nemausus gives (penultimate stress) Nemours, but with stress on the antepenultimate, Nîmes; Condate gives Condes or Condé, Arelate gives Arles or Arlet.
Other examples of forms stressed on the antepenultimate: Caturiges > Chorges, Cambo-ritum (“the curved ford”) Chambord, Eburovices Evreux, Durocasses Dreux, Bodiocasses Bayeux…    
Actually, the forms with antepenultimate accent are not those that pose a problem: those were there also in Latin and even in Late Latin (e.g.: hóminem > homme). The problem is to know why some of these words have become accented on the penultimate, with lengthening of the penultimate vowel (Cóndate > Condáte > Condāte > Condé). It is not certain that the phenomenon really goes back to Gaulish: this may be due to socio-linguistic disparities in Gallo-Roman society

(3) Comments:
While it is certainly true that Latin knew stress on the antepenultimate, this was only true for words where the penultimate was short. As length was not normally indicated in Latin writing, we partially have to rely on the stress indicated by the modern forms of the names or on etymology to establish Gaulish vowel length; in this case, relying on the modern stress can become a circular argument. But there ought to be no doubt that names like Nemausus or the names in –casses ought to have penultimate stress in accordance with Latin rules, so the antepenultimate stress indicated by some of the modern French names needs to be explained. I’ve also generally seen the “i” in –riges described as long; again, that would demand penultimate accent according to Latin rules. Of course, as the authors state, the indicated stress may not be the Gaulish stress but due to some differences between Gallo-Roman and Standard Latin; that we’ll probably never know.
I originally posted to respond to the statement that Celtic had word-initial stress - an opinion that has a good pedigree but is supported by surprisingly little evidence - the only Celtic branch that clearly has initial stress is Goidelic. Brythonic had penultimate stress and for Continental  Celtic we only have the clues for Gaulish quoted above, which point to antepenultimate stress. Forms like Némausus and Cóndate could also indicate word-initial stress, but most of the forms with more than three syllables rule that out. The only exception is Arelate, where forms like Arles actually don’t indicate antepenultimate stress, but initial (or ante-antepenultimate) stress, something that Lambert seems not to notice. So perhaps Gaulish didn’t have a fixed stress, or prefixed nouns (prefix are-) behaved differently?