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Could the names Ilya and Julius be related? (thebrainbin.org)

submitted 6 days ago by Auster@thebrainbin.org to c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works

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Besides a woman's name, Ilya afaik is also the Russian word for a species of flower. But with the little I know of Russian, trying to approach the pronunciation to what I'd expect it to be, it sounds like the female form of Julius, Julia, if I was to pronounce by Norwegian logic, the language not being geographically too far from the Slav ones.

And it wouldn't be the first name I see that changes for some random reason. For example, to my knowledge, the male name Tiago comes from a long line of mispronunciations starting at Jacob/Jacobus.

So going by that, it makes me think, could those two names, Ilya and Julius, be related? Or would their phonetic similarity be a coincidence?

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[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Dunno what the acronym PIE is, but going by the religious examples, vpol's comment makes me think, didn't a few names get from Hebrew to Latin through the Greeks?

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Proto-Indo-European. Hebrew being a Semitic language from an area mostly full of other Semitic languages makes me think it's unlikely to have picked up a PIE name though

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It would be theoretically possible that Proto-Indo-European picked a Proto-Semitic personal name or vice versa; both languages coexisted, and interacted a bit, as shown by the PIE word *táwros "bull" (see Latin "taurus") vs. PS root *ṯawr- "bull" (see Arabic ثَوْر ṯawr).

It could be also a PIE descendant borrowing the name for a PS descendant. Latin for example wasn't shy of borrowing even common words from Punic, like mappa "map" (Hebrew still keeps a side-relative of that as ⟨מַפָּה⟩ mappā, "cloth/map").

I just don't think it's the case for this specific pair of words. Ilya is cognate to Elias, it's clearly a Christian name, while Julia has been in Latin for longer than Christianity.

[–] DiscoAssBlazer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yo, 4 days late but I'd like to ask:

Do you think the PIE for Earth/Erde etc is related to PS Ardh/Eretz? They both have the same meaning and similar pronunciations, and with the Taurus Thawr thing, I see it being possible

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Coincidence. The roots are quite different: PIE *h₁er- versus PS *ʔarṣ́-.

The reason they ended similar is that Proto-Germanic inherited this root with a suffix for stative nouns, as *h₁ertéh₂ (The word probably meant "grounded stuff" or similar, then later the ground itself.) That *t ended as /θ/ through Grimm's Law, English kept it this way, German re-fortified it back to /d/.

Then in the Proto-Semitic side of the things, *ṣ́ was probably /ɬʼ/ or /t͡ɬʼ/. It's probably lateral since back then, because the South Arabian languages kept it as /ɬʼ/; Hebrew and Arabic delateralised it to /t͡s/ and /dˤ/ respectively.

[–] DiscoAssBlazer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you! Have had that question for a long time. Appreciate your linguistics content on Lemmy

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're welcome! Note there's !linguistics@mander.xyz for more "serious" stuff, like this. (Not that I'll remove serious stuff from here, but still.)

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Ah. Not sent to me (I think), but I must've misclicked when picking the community to post on, so gomennasorry~ 😣

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 22 hours ago

Daijokay. Both comms could use more activity anyway :D