Talk:dodder

@Fay Freak, Rua, the etymology of dodder is originally from {{R:ine:IEW|head=4. dheu-, dheu̯ə-|pages=261-267}} but even {{R:gem:EDPG|*dudra/ōn-|106}} finds it highly dubious. --{{victar|talk}} 00:04, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, one thing I could have written also is that it “sounds old”. One has ceased to do such things about 1960. If nothing better is assessed, then it is better to just remove the etymology, as I often think about such old things. It looks helpless. Fay Freak (talk) 00:09, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Leasnam, that etymology you added is many times worse. The yoke word is unrelated, according to {{R:gem:EDPG}}, and you added no sources. --{{victar|talk}} 04:50, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Well, it does come from Middle English doder, that much is certain. A cognate would be Dutch dodder (“wild flax (camelina sativa)”), West Flemish dodder (“mass of twisted flax”), Danish dodder (“a type of weed”). I supposed anything else pertaining to "yolk" can be removed ? Leasnam (talk) 04:59, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Leasnam: Yeah, that yolk stuff should be removed, at the very least. --{{victar|talk}} 05:04, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Leasnam, I added an entry for Proto-Germanic *dudraz. Feel free to update this entry's etymology accordingly. --{{victar|talk}} 08:22, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Fay Freak, Leasnam, I went more with the "yellow" etymology, which seems stronger, thanks to Fay's Russian parallel. Despite Kroonen's objection, I also connected it to Tocharian B [Term?] (tute, “yellow”), which actually also (allegedly) connects it to *dusnaz (“brownish, yellow”), and makes me wonder if *dʰh₂us-(t)ro- couldn't work as a PIE reconstruction. --{{victar|talk}} 17:32, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Leasnam, Victar Russian желто́к isn’t a plant name, however I search, there is literally nowhere such a Russian plant name, in Tönnies Fonne’s it is in a list of foodstuff, right after “eggwhite”, “dodder” means yolk here – it is homonymous in Low German with the plant name. I found it after the stupid sentence in Etymologisches Wörterbuch der germanischen Primäradjektive: “Für die Benennung des Dotters nach seiner Farbe gibt es Parallelen (frz. jaune d’œuf, russ. želtok u.a.); die Pflanze ist eher nach dem Dotter benannt als umgekehrt.” Here “Dotter” apparently means “yolk” too, and I imagined they mean that the plant is called in French jaune d’œuf and in Russian желток. Fay Freak (talk) 19:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Too bad. --{{victar|talk}} 19:24, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Fay Freak, that Björkman synopsis you wrote is very confusingly written. Perhaps you can go back and clean it up. Also, that's pretty dirty how you threw it in the reference like that. --{{victar|talk}} 21:12, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Victar I don’t know what you mean with “dirty”. It is not uncommon to write more in references. I don’t know know how good your German is but he made a list in the ZdS volume 2 of words only attested in West Germanic. And in volume 3 he brings the dodder material as addendum to that list, saying that “the Nordic words are probably loaned from German”. But he does not mention Icelandic, which must influence the judgment, which is what I expounded. Extensive borrowing from Low German cannot happened between Germany and that island – though we have some borrowings from Low German and Dutch in Category:Icelandic borrowed terms, it is not so likely for random plant names. If the Icelandic exists of course! I don’t find the Icelandic but I am not experienced in what one can search for Icelandic and for such a small people it can well be that some plant name has not yet made it to the internet. Question for @BigDom, Krun: Do you know that plant name, can you create it with a quote? Fay Freak (talk) 21:30, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

It's bad form to do so and goes against formatting practices, which is why I removed it and put {{q}} notes behind the relative sections. What does "Germans might have picked up the plant name from a substrate in Northwest Germany" mean? --{{victar|talk}} 21:41, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Victar It means: Возможно германцы подобрали это слово въ сѣверо-западѣ Германіи какъ субстратъ и потом передали его сѣвернымъ германцамъ. Fay Freak (talk) 22:28, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: The question still stands. Who are "the Germans" and what "substrate" are they borrowing from? --{{victar|talk}} 22:34, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

That’s always the problem with “substrates”. However also according to Björkman many plant names are from unknown substrates. Well what was spoken before Germanic? I don’t know, I am not Vennemann. Fay Freak (talk) 22:35, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: I'm going to assume we're misunderstanding each other and that you're not just intentionally being obtuse.

Let me try this again. You said in your edit comment "Also it does not say it is from substrate, it says it is only West-Germanic." Then why are you writing "Germans might have picked up the plant name from a substrate in Northwest Germany"? And again, who are "the Germans" in your sentence? --{{victar|talk}} 23:03, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I wrote it because it is a possibility; a possibility that is not far-fetched for plant names. Which harmonizes with what Björkman wrote. Quite clear, no? “Spinning the story further”, I wrote. Note that there is a big time gap between the first attestations of this word and Proto-Germanic, of more than a millenium. One way the word could have been obtained is internal derivation, but this does not need to be so. Since inner derivations are uncertain, it could have been just a borrowing from an unknown source. This is constantly underestimated, that there are borrowings from unknown sources, especially for languages we reconstruct in the first place because the sources on it are but its descendants. And the argument is here that if the North Germanic is borrowed from West Germanic then there is less right to reconstruct a Proto-Germanic term and it is more likely that it has been borrowed from somewhere in that large time gap. All possibilities. Whether Björkman actually thought that is irrelevant since we write the histories of the words and not of the language science. Fay Freak (talk) 23:25, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Fay Freak, Victar: The Íslensk orðsifjabók says for doðra that it has only been attested since the 19th century. Moreover no such word appears in Geir T. Zoega's Old Icelandic (Old Norse) dictionary so it seems like a borrowing. For the plant name, it says: "Óvíst er hvort jurtarheitið doðra tekur fremur mið af lögun og lit blómhnappanna eða einhverjum doðaáhrifum plöntunnar, sbr. sæ. dodra ‘hörplanta’, þ. dotterblume ‘hófsóley’." (It is unclear whether the plant name takes into account the form and colour of the flower buds, or some of the numbing/lethargic effects of the plant, compare Swedish dodra "flax", German Dotterblume "marsh marigold".) BigDom 19:38, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@BigDom, Krun, would either of you happen to have a copy of Namn och bygd, volume 1-2? It it, it reconstructs Old Norse *doðra, but I don't have the full text. --{{victar|talk}} 21:06, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@Victar No, sorry. BigDom 09:25, 25 June 2019 (UTC)