Talk:liman
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I wasn't sure where to post this as it combines elements of an RFE and RFV, but can anyone confirm that the noun defined in etymology section 1 exists, as is currently claimed, as a French-derived word meaning "silt"? All I can find, including for phrases like google books:"liman deposits", are in the context of the Black Sea (where, as e.g. Dictionary.com notes, the unrelated, Slavic-derived word liman can refer not only to the estuaries/lagoons but to the sandbars and deposits of silt/mud that delineate them), or refer to the Liman Substage. - -sche (discuss) 22:51, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
- I think I see what happened. First of all, works like this one refer to slime floating down a river and being deposited where it reaches the ocean to form a barrier, and specifically to limans as the places where this happens. Then there are bacteriological references such as this one that talk about "liman mud", which is mud found in limans that has concentrations of sulphides due to bacterial action. This mud was heated and applied therapeutically at health resorts in those areas, as described here, where it refers to the "Liman cure". Finally, the Webster lexicographers, probably influenced by the purported French etymon, decided that the word referred to the slime/mud that was deposited to form the estuary, rather than the estuary itself. Judging by a citation in the 1888 Oxford dictionary volume 6, this happened in 1879. This was picked up by many of their competitors and passed along unexamined long afterwards. Almost unexamined: in the January 31, 1891 edition of American Notes and Queries, someone asked for help from readers in response to what they considered "a plain error". Thus it seems to be not a ghost word, but a ghost definition and etymology. I've looked through all the viewable Google Books results for "liman" combined with "slime" and the only place I see the challenged sense is in dictionaries and glossaries.
- By the way: it may be "Slavic derived", but it apparently got to "Slavic" from Ancient Greek λιμήν (limḗn, “harbor”) by way of Turkish (see Turkish liman). Chuck Entz (talk) 03:19, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
- Which was reborrowed from (Ottoman) Turkish into modern Greek as λιμάνι (limáni). --Lambiam 20:00, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
- Digging into it further, I see you're right, I had thought liman sometimes did refer to silt albeit as ety 2, but in fact even some of the citations which speak of "liman deposits" sometimes clarify parenthetically or in the previous sentence that they mean "estuary (liman) deposits", not even clearly using the Russian/Ukrainian-derived word liman to mean "silt" (as Dictionary.com had suggested, apparently in a generous effort to save Webster's sense). So, we should drop etymology section 1, and maybe add a usage note (or mention in the etymology section) about the ghost definition and etymology, like aillse has. - -sche (discuss) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
- I've boldly dropped etymology section 1. Obviously, if anyone actually finds citations of liman meaning "slime" or "silt", this should be revised. - -sche (discuss) 21:38, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
- Ety 1 and ety 2 seem to be nouns describing the same thing. Equinox ◑ 17:41, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
- Striking as resolved. (Ety 1 / "slime" was deleted in October.) - -sche (discuss) 22:16, 20 December 2022 (UTC)