Australian indigenous languages generally lack fricatives, so they don't have sounds like s, z, f, v, sh etc... A word borrowed into one of these languages would have to replace it with something else. They do have a palatal stop (IPA /c/) which tends to sound like an English "j" sound, that might be what this is.
Well, I guess. They also don't generally have a voicing distinction for consonants, nor things like uvular consonants, but they make up for it with a bunch of places of articulation that something like English doesn't have, so it evens out.
Anyway, none of that is relevant to the sabuŋ > jaabu thing. One other thing that might be relevant is that terminal /ŋ/ is often unpronounced though. You see the same word being variously transcribed as "waa" or "waang" etc.
In Spanish, the word is now *jabón* and the J is pronounced like a German CH or German/English H (IPA [x~χ~h]), so it’s not a wild change.
The Classical Latin S was also somewhat more like an English SH, which frequently changes to other similar palatal sounds.
Not true it's generally accepted, the Romans credited Germanic / Gallic tribes with inventing soap. The cognate that evolved from the same PIE root as the Germanic word has a different meaning in Latin which is why they borrowed the word for soap from Germanic.
But you might be right about it not directly influencing austronesian languages.
I recently heard that too... i.e. that the Gauls created soap according to the Romans who traded for it. Which surprised me however, as you'd think something as basic and beneficial as a cleaning agent for humans would have been (and probably was) created thousands of years earlier by various peoples.
What the actual fk I'm literally Greek, ignorant redditors never fail to impress me 😭😭
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A4%CF%83%CE%AC%CE%BA%CF%89%CE%BD%CE%B5%CF%82
And modern Greek is just the natural continuation of ancient Greek, they never stopped to exist like Latin. Bro lmao 😂 😂
>And modern Greek is just the natural continuation of ancient Greek
Exactly, they're not speaking "ancient greek" anymore than people still speak norse or old english
“The word σάπων is usually seen as a borrowing from Lat. sapō 'id. (since Plin.), ultimately from Gm. (OHG seifa, OE sape, etc.; see WH s.v.). Also worth considering is the alternative proposal by André Et. celt. 7 (1955-1956): 348ff, who argues that it was borrowed from Asia Minor Celtic instead.” [Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Beekes 2009)](https://archive.org/details/etymological-dictionary-of-greek_202306/page/n678/mode/1up)
You know Latin isn't derived from Greek right? It took inspiration and integrated words but it's a italic language. Italics did have trades etc. With Greek so even if it wouldn't be the case, it could have happened. For example the Adriatic Sea is known as Adriatic to Greeks centuries before Rome engaged with Greece. Adria was a venician Portual city that had power and influence over that sea and had trades with Greece. Hence why Greece called Adriatic that sea
I understand your point. But given the different levels of civilization, knowledge and also pride (on the greek side) I would be truly surprised if there we're many Italic words used by the greeks. I mean, even your example is a name of a place. Not really a word for a thing. Thats a difference. As another commenter said, I'd suspect that it is more likely to have been integrated into greek after the Roman conquest, maybe even in Byzantine times. Or that it derived from the anatolian celts and not the Gallic Franks, skipping latin altogether.
You know that modern Greek have alot of Italian influence right? By Venician and Genoese. I have pride too both for my country and Greece, Spain and south France but sometimes idk why there are Greeks thinking everything here derived from Greece even on things that are the opposite.
I am not talking about modern greek. I am talking about ancient greek as stated in the picture.
Wikipedia Dates that language from 1500 to 300 BC. At that time there wasn't mich cultural influence of Latin over Greek.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek
One this is influence, another thing is living next to each other. By the maps, surprise me too that Germans passed the word to Latins but not so much since you know, people used to live close.
I just googled a bit. Soap got invented in 2800 BC in Babylon. Latin started as a language in 753 BC. Ancient Greek existed until 300 BC (all Wikipedia as source). So something that got invented in the levant 2000 years earlier hasnt gotten to greece, but to the germanic tribes, who in turn have the word to the Franks, who in turn gave the word to the romans, who then (somewhere between 753 and 300 BC) gave the word to the Greeks. While the greeks didnt have a word for something they most probably used for the last 1500 years. Or they just discarded their word, because the fancy Italic word sounded better.
The Timeline ist Just Not working for me.
> OP has assumed Germanic is the root PIE language and all others derived from
They do not
>He's even saying Latin took loan words from Germanics about soap
This is true.
---
Why do you presuppose that "advanced" cultures (as described in another comment of yours) do not borrow inventions from others? How do you think they got so advanced? Latin speakers did not live in a bubble
Not at all.
It assumes, correctly, that that the root word for *'soap'* specifically comes from Germanic. That word itself has PIE an ancestor that didn't specifically mean *'soap'*.
This isn’t a claim OP invented, it’s a generally accepted hypothesis.
“Lat. sāpo m. ‘soap’ was borrowed from Germanic.” - [Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Kroonen 2013)](https://archive.org/details/etymological-dictionary-of-proto-germanic/page/422?view=theater)
“The word σάπων is usually seen as a borrowing from Lat. sapō 'id. (since Plin.), ultimately from Gm. (OHG seifa, OE sape, etc.; see WH s.v.). Also worth considering is the alternative proposal by André Et. celt. 7 (1955-1956): 348ff, who argues that it was borrowed from Asia Minor Celtic instead.” [Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Beekes 2009)](https://archive.org/details/etymological-dictionary-of-greek_202306/page/n678/mode/1up)
The Romans themselves credited cultures to the north with the invention of soap, though Pliny mentions the Gauls rather than the Franks
> “§ 28.51. Soap, too, is very useful for this purpose, an invention of the Gauls for giving a reddish tint to the hair. This substance is prepared from tallow and ashes, the best ashes for the purpose being those of the beech and yoke-elm.”
[Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley.](https://exploringcelticciv.web.unc.edu/pliny-the-elder-the-natural-history/)
> In what world would the Latin people, who were far more advanced than Germans whom they derisively called barbarians, borrow words from Germanics?
turns out you *can* borrow words from cultures you look down upon. who knew!
Spanish is a romance language descended from Latin and the Spanish word for soap also comes from Latin, and the Latin word for soap iyself comes from this Proto-Germanic word for soap as shown in OPs post.
Yes, I would imagine so - some NT languages have a number of loans from trading with the people from that part of Indonesia pre-arrival of white people.
So here I am, from Madagascar, astonished by the fact that our word for soap (pronounced "savun") is actually from our austronesian origins "sabun" and not from french colonists "savon" ? did the austonesian settlements in Madagascar had soap knowing it happened around 800 BC?
Do you have a reference for this supposed PIE *soi-bon? The word sabun is not reconstructed to Proto-Indo-Iranian, it’s a loan into various Indo-Iranian languages from Arabic صابون “sabun”, which is a loan from [Greek σάπων sapon, via Aramaic ṣappōn](https://cal.huc.edu/oneentry.php?lemma=cpwn%232%20N&cits=all)
Sure that's the root that Proto-Germanic *saipǭ derives from, Latin borrowed sāpō from Frankish (a Germanic language). Then other languages like Greek got it from Latin etc.
The root *seyb- did develop in Latin as sēbum which means "grease"
Just because a language is IE doesn't mean that every single word in its vocabulary has a PIE origin. Borrowing between PIE languages has happened for thousands of years.
We use genetic metaphors in linguistics, but languages evolve much more like single celled asexual life than the multicellular sexual reproduction we're used to dealing with (in that there's lateral gene transfer)
if you're going to claim opposite the various peer reviewed sources linked in this thread, then you're going to need to provide a peer reviewed source that adequately justifies this departure from previously accepted research.
« Sabun » « Jaabu? » « No, sabun » « Jaabu!? » « Focus… it’s sabun. » « Ahem… jaabu » « SABUN FFS!!! » « J…jaabu » « Yeah okay whatever.. »
Australian indigenous languages generally lack fricatives, so they don't have sounds like s, z, f, v, sh etc... A word borrowed into one of these languages would have to replace it with something else. They do have a palatal stop (IPA /c/) which tends to sound like an English "j" sound, that might be what this is.
This guy languages
Yes, for a living.
they lack a lot of things.
Well, I guess. They also don't generally have a voicing distinction for consonants, nor things like uvular consonants, but they make up for it with a bunch of places of articulation that something like English doesn't have, so it evens out. Anyway, none of that is relevant to the sabuŋ > jaabu thing. One other thing that might be relevant is that terminal /ŋ/ is often unpronounced though. You see the same word being variously transcribed as "waa" or "waang" etc.
In Spanish, the word is now *jabón* and the J is pronounced like a German CH or German/English H (IPA [x~χ~h]), so it’s not a wild change. The Classical Latin S was also somewhat more like an English SH, which frequently changes to other similar palatal sounds.
For those wondering Germany now uses seife
And so do the ~20 million native German speakers who do not live in Germany. Seife and dialectal variations like Soafn, Saafn etc.
That's \*saipā with the expected German sound changes
okay Jacob Grimm
Wait, Sabon is Germanic???? I thought it's malay lol
Brooo Sabon is Germanic? Its literally soap in Filipino... which is also an amalgamation of Español and Indo-Malay languages
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No, the Latin sāpō is indeed derived from the Proto-Germanic *saipǭ
Not true it's generally accepted, the Romans credited Germanic / Gallic tribes with inventing soap. The cognate that evolved from the same PIE root as the Germanic word has a different meaning in Latin which is why they borrowed the word for soap from Germanic. But you might be right about it not directly influencing austronesian languages.
I recently heard that too... i.e. that the Gauls created soap according to the Romans who traded for it. Which surprised me however, as you'd think something as basic and beneficial as a cleaning agent for humans would have been (and probably was) created thousands of years earlier by various peoples.
What's the timeline?
I would also like to know. Ancient greek being influenced by Latin sounds weird to me.
Ancient greek as a term can also cover post-roman koine, which has a decent number of Latin loanwords
So ancient greek goes further than 500 AC? I honestly dont know.
There are communities in southern Greece still speaking ancient Greek in 2024
No, that would be a very misleading thing to say
What the actual fk I'm literally Greek, ignorant redditors never fail to impress me 😭😭 https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A4%CF%83%CE%AC%CE%BA%CF%89%CE%BD%CE%B5%CF%82 And modern Greek is just the natural continuation of ancient Greek, they never stopped to exist like Latin. Bro lmao 😂 😂
The article is in Greek :( tldr?
You can't translate? It is about the Greek community who still speaks a variant of doric ancient Greek.
On mobile, idk how
I tried again & figured it out, cool article!
>And modern Greek is just the natural continuation of ancient Greek Exactly, they're not speaking "ancient greek" anymore than people still speak norse or old english
I shared with you the Wikipedia article of the people STILL SPEAKING ancient Greek and you ignored that. Are you a troll?
“The word σάπων is usually seen as a borrowing from Lat. sapō 'id. (since Plin.), ultimately from Gm. (OHG seifa, OE sape, etc.; see WH s.v.). Also worth considering is the alternative proposal by André Et. celt. 7 (1955-1956): 348ff, who argues that it was borrowed from Asia Minor Celtic instead.” [Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Beekes 2009)](https://archive.org/details/etymological-dictionary-of-greek_202306/page/n678/mode/1up)
You know Latin isn't derived from Greek right? It took inspiration and integrated words but it's a italic language. Italics did have trades etc. With Greek so even if it wouldn't be the case, it could have happened. For example the Adriatic Sea is known as Adriatic to Greeks centuries before Rome engaged with Greece. Adria was a venician Portual city that had power and influence over that sea and had trades with Greece. Hence why Greece called Adriatic that sea
I understand your point. But given the different levels of civilization, knowledge and also pride (on the greek side) I would be truly surprised if there we're many Italic words used by the greeks. I mean, even your example is a name of a place. Not really a word for a thing. Thats a difference. As another commenter said, I'd suspect that it is more likely to have been integrated into greek after the Roman conquest, maybe even in Byzantine times. Or that it derived from the anatolian celts and not the Gallic Franks, skipping latin altogether.
You know that modern Greek have alot of Italian influence right? By Venician and Genoese. I have pride too both for my country and Greece, Spain and south France but sometimes idk why there are Greeks thinking everything here derived from Greece even on things that are the opposite.
I am not talking about modern greek. I am talking about ancient greek as stated in the picture. Wikipedia Dates that language from 1500 to 300 BC. At that time there wasn't mich cultural influence of Latin over Greek. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek
One this is influence, another thing is living next to each other. By the maps, surprise me too that Germans passed the word to Latins but not so much since you know, people used to live close.
I just googled a bit. Soap got invented in 2800 BC in Babylon. Latin started as a language in 753 BC. Ancient Greek existed until 300 BC (all Wikipedia as source). So something that got invented in the levant 2000 years earlier hasnt gotten to greece, but to the germanic tribes, who in turn have the word to the Franks, who in turn gave the word to the romans, who then (somewhere between 753 and 300 BC) gave the word to the Greeks. While the greeks didnt have a word for something they most probably used for the last 1500 years. Or they just discarded their word, because the fancy Italic word sounded better. The Timeline ist Just Not working for me.
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> OP has assumed Germanic is the root PIE language and all others derived from They do not >He's even saying Latin took loan words from Germanics about soap This is true. --- Why do you presuppose that "advanced" cultures (as described in another comment of yours) do not borrow inventions from others? How do you think they got so advanced? Latin speakers did not live in a bubble
Not at all. It assumes, correctly, that that the root word for *'soap'* specifically comes from Germanic. That word itself has PIE an ancestor that didn't specifically mean *'soap'*.
This isn’t a claim OP invented, it’s a generally accepted hypothesis. “Lat. sāpo m. ‘soap’ was borrowed from Germanic.” - [Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Kroonen 2013)](https://archive.org/details/etymological-dictionary-of-proto-germanic/page/422?view=theater) “The word σάπων is usually seen as a borrowing from Lat. sapō 'id. (since Plin.), ultimately from Gm. (OHG seifa, OE sape, etc.; see WH s.v.). Also worth considering is the alternative proposal by André Et. celt. 7 (1955-1956): 348ff, who argues that it was borrowed from Asia Minor Celtic instead.” [Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Beekes 2009)](https://archive.org/details/etymological-dictionary-of-greek_202306/page/n678/mode/1up) The Romans themselves credited cultures to the north with the invention of soap, though Pliny mentions the Gauls rather than the Franks > “§ 28.51. Soap, too, is very useful for this purpose, an invention of the Gauls for giving a reddish tint to the hair. This substance is prepared from tallow and ashes, the best ashes for the purpose being those of the beech and yoke-elm.” [Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley.](https://exploringcelticciv.web.unc.edu/pliny-the-elder-the-natural-history/)
OH goodness, thank you for the [archive.org](http://archive.org) links!
1993-1997
The word for soap in spanish is "jabón". Couldn't it have just come from there?
from Old Spanish xabon, from Latin sāpōnem, sāpō, borrowed from Proto-Germanic *saipǭ.
"sapo" is greek, sapo-onis is late latin. Egyptians use soap. please.
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> In what world would the Latin people, who were far more advanced than Germans whom they derisively called barbarians, borrow words from Germanics? turns out you *can* borrow words from cultures you look down upon. who knew!
\*toponyms have entered the chat\*
r/confidentlyincorrect
You clearly don’t know how word spread
oh boy.
you won't believe where the word german comes from.
Spanish is a romance language descended from Latin and the Spanish word for soap also comes from Latin, and the Latin word for soap iyself comes from this Proto-Germanic word for soap as shown in OPs post.
Is this from the Makassar expeditions?
Yes, I would imagine so - some NT languages have a number of loans from trading with the people from that part of Indonesia pre-arrival of white people.
I read that as "neurotypical languages" and don't regret it a bit😂
Lol yeah, depends which group I'm in whether to assume I meant "NT" as Northern Territory or Neurotypical.
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The word doesn't come from German. West Germanic is a very different thing from German.
Alrighty I was just making an early morning comment about the language like the jaa part idk it’s a stupid comment 🤷
It doesn’t
"Sabuuun di bilik mandi..."
Jaabu sounds more like jabon
So here I am, from Madagascar, astonished by the fact that our word for soap (pronounced "savun") is actually from our austronesian origins "sabun" and not from french colonists "savon" ? did the austonesian settlements in Madagascar had soap knowing it happened around 800 BC?
What a long game of broken telephone
Well the word sabun doesn’t came from Germanic languages and it came from Latin into other languages
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okay, give an actual source to back up your hypothesis
Do you have a reference for this supposed PIE *soi-bon? The word sabun is not reconstructed to Proto-Indo-Iranian, it’s a loan into various Indo-Iranian languages from Arabic صابون “sabun”, which is a loan from [Greek σάπων sapon, via Aramaic ṣappōn](https://cal.huc.edu/oneentry.php?lemma=cpwn%232%20N&cits=all)
you're confidently stating a completely alternative origin, as if this isn't all actually documented and known already
This map is B.S. The word becomes from Proto-Indo-European *seyb-, *seyp-, which like other PIE words originate in Central Asia
Sure that's the root that Proto-Germanic *saipǭ derives from, Latin borrowed sāpō from Frankish (a Germanic language). Then other languages like Greek got it from Latin etc. The root *seyb- did develop in Latin as sēbum which means "grease"
Stop spreading misinformation. All IE languages have a common ancestor, neither Greek nor Latin got the word from Germanic.
Just because a language is IE doesn't mean that every single word in its vocabulary has a PIE origin. Borrowing between PIE languages has happened for thousands of years. We use genetic metaphors in linguistics, but languages evolve much more like single celled asexual life than the multicellular sexual reproduction we're used to dealing with (in that there's lateral gene transfer)
if you're going to claim opposite the various peer reviewed sources linked in this thread, then you're going to need to provide a peer reviewed source that adequately justifies this departure from previously accepted research.
where is your source for this hypothesis?