borrowing pronouns

[H. Mark Hubey]

Robert Whiting wrote:

> My lack of knowledge doubtless is the basis of the fact that I
> find Mark's lexical information somewhat confusing.  My
> dictionary gives Us (Mark: 'top of, above') as 'Grundlage',
> 'Basis' while Ust (not given by Mark) seems to correspond to the
> meaning he gives for Us.  And my dictionary does not give oz or
> ozghun at all so I suppose that they belong to a different branch
> of Turkic.

yes, Karachay-Balkar.

>I am surprised, though, that Mark did not come up
> with Ustat (Ustaz) and Ustadane, but perhaps these have been
> expunged from the language as being seen as having been borrowed
> from Persian or Arabic.  But since Mark knows more about Turkish

I did not find these in Redhouse. I think ustat is there.

> and Turkic than I ever will, I expect that there is a simple
> explanation.  It does, however, reinforce the point about doing
> comparisons with only a dictionary and a very limited knowledge
> of the language involved.

Well, a dictionary of the Turkic languages would/could have
easily been used (especially if in electronic form) to find all
these VC forms quite easily. In fact, I often do wish that
electronic dictionaries were available for all the IE and AA
languages (and others too). Writing a java program to do this
would have been lots of fun :-)

My reasoning says that the root/stem of this word has to do with
us, Us, or es, Os, or even oz (U is u-umlaut and O is o-umlaut).

us is archaic Turkish for 'mind, intelligence' etc. KB for
'us' is 'es'  Us is KB for 'on top of' as in UsUnde.
Ust is the Turkish version so it would be 'UstUnde'. The word
'oz' means 'to surpass, overtake' in KB, and shows up in Turkish
as 'az' (as in 'to be excessive'). In KB Os (o-umlaut) means
"to grow, grow high". Many words are derived from these as in
UstUn (superior), ozghun (someone who is excessive), azgIn (ditto),
usta (expert), uslu (well-behaved), usul (method), esle (to remember),
eskertme (memorial).

In fact, it goes even further I think, and it could be related to
Or (high), Orle (climb), Orge (upwards), etc  or even uch (to fly (high)),
uca (Azeri for 'great' whose Turkish version is yUce), uc (end), uz (?)
uzun (long), uzak (far), etc.

I'd think that 'us' means nothing useful in Farsi or Arabic, and
if it did, neither has probably as many words derived from it.
The root/stem has been in Turkic for a very long time apparently
even if it is borrowed which I find unlikely.

> And I have a question of Mark:  Is
> the term Ustat used an an honorific in Turkish as 'usta:dh is
> generally in Arabic?

Usta means 'master craftsman, expert', and is used to refer to
people, so it could be used as an honorific. ustad itself is
also used, actually it is more like Ustad. I believe that most
Turks themselves believe that it is from Farsi because it is
probably written that way in some dictionary.

Best Regards,
Mark
-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=