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There’s at least one loanword which arrived in Latin from a Trans–New Guinea language [0]. Latin→Indonesian doesn’t sound at all implausible to me, though equal
by bradrn 5y ago
There’s at least one loanword which arrived in Latin from a Trans–New Guinea language [0]. Latin→Indonesian doesn’t sound at all implausible to me, though equally it may be just coincidence.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/25619010/Things_your_classics_master_never_told_you_a_borrowing_from_Trans_New_Guinea_languages_into_Latin https://www.academia.edu/25619010/Things_your_classics_maste...
- ithkuil 5y agoLatin is quite a strange language. It never really died, or it did die but with a slow and uneven death. The example you being is emblematic: as the international language of scholars in Europe, when the new word "Musa" gets adopted in the 18th century from the arabic "mauz", on one hand sure, it's technically Latin and thus yes technically there is a Latin word whose etymology traces back to an Austronesian root. I'm the other hand though it clearly doesn't mean that this happened during ancient Roman times, which is the conclusion one would easily jump to under the assumption that Latin really died long long ago. Lingua latina mortua est, vivat lingua latina!
- bradrn 5y agoI’m pretty sure I saw somewhere that it was borrowed into Latin in ancient times, though perhaps I was wrong. Still, a TNG→Arabic borrowing is nearly as good as a TNG→Latin one.
- ithkuil 5y agoAre we talking about the name of a fruit that comes from the same place where the name was borrowed from? If so, why is that surprising?
- bradrn 5y agoYes, we are. The only surprising thing about this is that one wouldn’t prima facie expect a loan into any European language from a New Guinean language before the Age of Exploration, and this particular word went through more intermediate languages than usual. Other than those features, there’s nothing particularly unusual about this.