waiN

[R. Rankin]

'wear' and 'carry' are certainly related in lots of
languages.  My only problem is with the putative Siouan
derivation.  There are lots of KI's in MVS, but I'm not
crazy about the semantics of *k- here without parallel
cases.  If we're saying it's derivation, then maybe it
will be possible to find other cases without stretching
meanings too much.

Bob

> If the situation in other MVS languages is
> inconsistent with the hypothesis I proposed,
> then that will shoot down the hypothesis;
> that was what I was asking about.  But I
> don't think what I suggested is anywhere
> nearly as far-fetched as the flying fox feet
> of our Roman grammarians.  This weekend I
> browsed a few dictionaries of Old World
> languages, looking for cases where the word
> for 'wear' was the same as the word for 'carry'.
>
> I already knew that these were the same in
> German with the word 'tragen', which is also
> cognate to our word 'drag'.  It turns out that
> Dutch also uses 'dragen' for both 'carry' and
> 'wear'; Swedish uses 'baera'; French uses
> 'porter'; Spanish uses both 'llevar' and
> 'traer' in both senses; Czech, Serbo-Croatian
> and Russian all use something like 'nosit';
> and ancient Latin used 'gerere'.  Thus, it
> seems that equivalence of the concepts 'carry'
> and 'wear' is the norm in Germanic, Slavic and
> Romance, the three most wide-spread European
> language groups.  Our own word 'wear' comes
> from Old English 'werian', which meant both
> 'wear' and 'carry' according to my little
> American Heritage Dictionary.
>
> Outside of these, equation of these two
> concepts was less common.  I did not find it
> in Basque, Irish, Latvian, Turkish, Japanese
> or Swahili.  I did find it, however, in
> Estonian and Kurdish.
>
> Hence, it seems that the concept 'wear' very
> commonly, but certainly not always, derives
> from the concept 'carry'.  To have two roots
> so similar in MVS, one meaning 'wear' and the
> other meaning 'carry', where one may simply
> be the reflexive version of the other, in the
> absence of evidence to the contrary, is highly
> suggestive of an earlier equivalence here.
> This would not detract in any way from the
> fact that these are distinct roots in the
> daughter languages, as Bob pointed out earlier.
>
> Rory
>
>
>