User:KYPark/mor

Revision as of 16:41, 29 May 2006 (edited by) User:Widsith

The citation is needed to clear up the following doubts:

1. That mor makes the second sense "mountain," although this second sounds rather like an antonym to the first.
2. That mor gave way to morberige#Old English, while which sense is unclear, "moor" or "mountain," and while it is derived from morus#Latin more allegedly and acceptedly elsewhere, within Wiktionary at least.

--KYPark (talk) 01:47, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I would be very skeptical of deriving mōrberiġe from 'either "moor" or "mountain", since the tree isn't particularly associated with either. Besides, Latin mōrus is too good a fit to ignore without a very good reason. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:26, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

The said editor User:Widsith is an expert in Old English, as far as I know. The question may be not that simple. Latin morus and morum appear poorly rendered here in meaning and etymology, etc. Refer to Ancient Greek μόρον (moron), (1) black mulberry and (2) blackberry. (The mulberry is almost black!) These suggest "any black berry," briefly but broadly, or far more broadly than the mere mulberry, which had been either rather rare or rarely cared in Europe until it became crazy about silk rather recently or posterior to Ancient Greek! The mulberry, however newly popular, is just a mere black berry, whether mountainous or cultivated, or while it grows mountaineous before cultivated. One more thing is that the black berry is found abundant in the moorland, as well as in the mountain, such as bilberry, blueberry, cranberry or mossberry, fenberry, huckleberry, etc. --KYPark (talk) 09:01, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

(I am not an expert. Ƿidsiþ 12:41, 14 April 2012 (UTC))

Then please advise us who is a real expert, within Wiktionary, you should know. --KYPark (talk) 09:40, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I never said he wasn't an expert. Plant names are a rather specialized sub-field, though, and one can find dictionaries that disagree with him on this point. As for the relationship between mulberry and blackberry: it isn't really just about the color. Both are very similar in shape, being compound fruits.

In Romance languages, you can definitely see the connection of the two senses, but they aren't always randomly interchangeable. Although French refers to both by the same name, Spanish refers to the tree as moro, with the berry being mora (fruit names tend to use one gender for the plant and another for the plant, though the specific genders vary), and blackberry as zarzamora, from zarza=vine + mora. You may notice that the tree follows the multi-gender pattern, but the vine has both fruit and plant as feminine- suggesting it's a secondary derivation.

In Germanic languages. the mōrus derivative seems to refer mostly to the tree, since the vine is a familiar northern European native with local names, but the tree is more of foreign origin, with the name being borrowed with the tree. Modern descendants include German Maulbeere and English mulberry. The fact that mulberry refers to the tree and not the vine is probably the most significant evidence for the meaning of the Old English term. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:28, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I should add that blackberry is a specific term for species in the genus Rubus, and shouldn't be confused with the concept of a berry that's black in color: berries like the moorland species you mentioned (I'm not familiar with a couple of the names, though) are never properly referred to as blackberries, just as crows are black birds, but not blackbirds. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:49, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Most berries, when fully ripened, become dark or deep colored rather than literally black. By moron Ancient Greek and most Romance languages (except Latin morum here) mean not just the mulberry (fruit than tree) but practically the berry in general or Rubus. Simply, Ancient Greek moron is English berry, to me. Then, to say mulberry is to say berryberry, granted that the first part mul- was purely derived from moron. This overlap is so funny that Widsith's etymology may be more preferable to yours and many others. Actually, for example, w:Blackberry that is practically moron or Rubus is linked to w:ko:산딸기 literally "mountain berry" in accordance with Widsith's second sense. Overwhelmed by the emerging cultivars, however, this archaic sense is getting less and less and less. Such may have been the case with the archaic sense of morberige thus reduced to the tree feeding the silkworm. --KYPark (talk) 15:36, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Errata: w:Rubus instead of w:Blackberry links to w:ko:산딸기속 "mountain berry species" instead of w:ko:산딸기 "mountain berry" either literally. --KYPark (talk) 03:40, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

My understanding is that the Ancient Greek word μόρον (móron) had two senses: mulberry (Morus species) and blackberry (Rubus species). These are very different botanically, but the fruits look almost identical and quite unlike any other berries from the area. I notice that the blackberry was referred to in at least one ancient text as “μόρον (móron) τοῦ (toû) βάτου (bátou)" (ref: LSJ at Perseus , which basically means moron of the (βάτος (bátos) gives its name to the study of the genus Rubus, batology). Where this dual meaning is split, as in Spanish, it's the Rubus sense that takes the qualifying adjective, while Morus sense keeps the unqualified form. More to the point, I have yet to see any evidence that the Rubus sense ever made it into the Germanic languages that borrowed the word from Latin- but the modern-day descendants of those loanwords seem to all have the Morus sense. Until I see some actual evidence that mōrberiġe refers to anything other than [[mulberry|mulberries||, I have to conclude that all the other stuff you've brought up has no bearing on this topic whatsoever. Chuck Entz (talk) 10:50, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

My understanding is that you may misunderstand my original stand point that I'm in a position of learning rather than teaching or imposing anything authoritatively. Even my table below is borrowed and just made sortable for everybody's reference in helping rethink the etymology of morberige as suggested not by myself but by Widsith. (You may find it rubbish but some others might otherwise.) In the beginning I just asked for the "citation needed" for that, hopefully supplied by him as the responsible editor. Indeed I wished him to respond. It's you, I fear, who jumped in and made the matter more complicated than I expected in the beginning, though you are quite alright and welcome to do so as far as you keep fair. Unfair to me, for example, was your uneasy opening response "I never said he wasn't an expert." I never said you said that! I just meant I respect his expertise, regardless of your judgment and mindless of imposing my judgment on anyone. It's up to you whatever conclusion you make. But it may be a personal attack to say "all the other stuff you've brought up has no bearing on this topic whatsoever," I fear. I may help note that archaic moron means not only Morus but also Rubus whereas its likely descendant mulberry only the former. Isn't this where some anomaly may be found at all? It is also noteworthy that the dual meaning of moron is more likely to stem from the similar fruits than the different genera Morus and Rubus, regardless of which one came first. It is doubtful or unlikely, however, that the moron meant the very mulberry in the beginning. The right etymology of morberige may be able to clear up such doubts. --KYPark (talk) 16:21, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Here's what I've found so far:

1. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Bosworth-Toller), Supplement, p.642 (ref: )
   • môr-berige, an; f. A mulberry: — Hî mid môrberium gebyldon þa ylpas (to the end they might provoke the elephants to fight, they showed them the blood of grapes and mulberries, I Macc. 6, 34), for ðam þe môr-berian him is metta leófost, Hml. S. 25, 576.
2. Aelfric's Lives of the Saints 25:574-576, which in this passage is retelling the story of I Maccabees in Old English (ref: )

   • Þa haeðenan ða ferdon to ðam gefeohte swyðe

     and mid môr-berium gebyldon þa ylpas

     forðan þe môr-berian him is metta leofost

     • The heathen then went to the battle swiftly,

       and with mulberries emboldened the elephants,

       because mulberries are to them the pleasantest of food

3. I Maccabees 6:34, the oldest surviving version of which is the Septuagint (there probably was a Hebrew or Aramaic original that's lost), with the Vulgate being the version best known in the medieval church (ref:).
   • Septuagint (Ancient Greek/koine):καὶ τοῖς ἐλέφασιν ἔδειξα αἷμα σταφυλῆς καὶ μόρων τοῦ παραστῆσαι αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸν πόλεμον
   • Vulgate (Latin): et elefantis ostenderunt sanguinem uvae et mori ad acuendos eos in proelium
   • King James: And to the end they might provoke the elephants to fight, they shewed them the blood of grapes and mulberries.

(forgot to sign earlier) Chuck Entz (talk) 15:02, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

elephant

The elephant would better be the wolf.

blood of grapes and mulberries

While this may be literally nonsensical, it could mean the kinship of grapes and berries, that is, of Latin vinum and merum, as related to wine, that is, cultural and natural grapes. --KYPark (talk) 10:33, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

No one is suggesting ylp as wolf, since wulf is a well-known term for that in Old English. There's no need to speculate about the meaning of blood of grapes and mulberries: it's obviously a reference to the juice, which allegedly looked enough like blood to agitate the elephants into fighting. I'm sure that elephants were unfamiliar enough to the writer that some rumors or folk beliefs may have been aded to the historical account. They certainly were unknown in England, so it's not surprising that Aelfric missed the point of the passage and went astray with some idle speculation about the reason the juice was shown to the elephants. Old English had names for elephants, lions, and camels, but they were legendary beasts from faraway places. It would seem like mulberries would have had similar status, unless some of the less-perishable products made from the fruit might have made their way there in trade with countries to the south. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:00, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mulberry&allowed_in_frame=0

... Children's singing game with a chorus beginning "Here we go round the mulberry bush" is attested from 1820s, first in Scotland.

• The mulberry now is not a bush but tree! So the "bush" above, if true, suggests that OE morberige in the beginning may not have been the rare black or white mulberry tree, but mainly the common blackberry bush, shrub or bramble, in accordance with the Ancient Greek rather than Latin sense. Then the above Latin and English translations may be problematic.
• The "uvae" or cultivated grapes would better mate with the "mori" or wild grapes and common berries than with the rare mulberry fruits.
• Refer to w:ang:Mōr "oþþe fen" and w:ang:Fenberȝe "fenberry, cranberry, or bearberry." As such, OE morberige may have been a synonym to OE fenberȝe.
• Compare berry#Etymology 1 "berry" and berry#Etymology 2 "barrow, mound" akin to berg "mountain." Both not only share the obsolete spelling berȝe but also may be akin. That is, OE berige may have orginally meant the wild or "mountain" grapes and other juicy fruit rather than OE mor meant not only (1) morass, but also (2) mountain, strangely.
• You got the "blood" of grapes and mulberries. Still the ylp is too hard for me to relate to the elephant, while the battle is so easy to relate to the wolf and beowolf, that is, beorn and guma "warrior". Anyway, this is not a point at the moment. --KYPark (talk) 03:07, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Mature mulberries in favorable environments are certainly trees, but when young, and in colder climates such as Scotland, they can be shrubs. It's also dangerous to base things on details in children's songs, since they often contain nonsense: a similar song starts out "All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel", which shouldn't be used to argue that monkeys run loose in the UK, or that they chase weasels.

All of this is irrelevant, though, since the original question had to do with the origin of the term morberige, and most of your points seem to be based on aspects of Latin morus or Ancient Greek μόρον, thus apparently conceding that it's not derived from either the moor or mountain senses of Old English mor Chuck Entz (talk) 19:12, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

I do wonder which is sane indeed, you or me. You began with:

I would be very skeptical of deriving mōrberiġe from 'either "moor" or "mountain", since the tree isn't particularly associated with either. Besides, Latin mōrus is too good a fit to ignore without a very good reason.

It's you to argue that OE morberige has nothing to do with either "moor" or "mountain" but no doubt only with Latin morus as "too good a fit to ignore without a very good reason." But I do doubt it not at will but by virtue of its editor's expertise! Accordingly, and more clearly as I see, the mor of morberige probably means "moor" rather than "mountain," which the edior left uncleared, and so I asked him to clear up only to be replied, out of focus, that he or she is not such an expert as I believed. I am not "apparently conceding" but surely arguing that the morberige in question is rooted in mor, not only according to the said editor but also the "mulberry bush" and so on. I take it very very seriously that your rhetoric under the circumstances such as "All of this is irrelevant" is most likely to aim at a personal attack on me, betraying the duty of the debaters to be cordial, I'm very sorry. May I take this opportunity to ask if you happen to be a Christian or Abrahamist? --KYPark (talk) 10:46, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Addressing some other points:

• Remember we're talking about modern-day Israel for the Maccabees passage, so the tree may not have been at all scarce there: it apparently was widely cultivated. Not that it matters- we know that μόρον could refer to either. The question is how Latin-educated scholars in England might have interpreted it many centuries later.
• The comparison with fenberge is a bit of a stretch, since the only uses I've been able to find have been in the context of the Maccabees passage
• Are you trying to connect berry with berg? Aside from the fact that that would make fenberry problematic, the two words have completely different histories: the Dutch cognate bes shows that the r is from a Proto-Germanic *z, which normally rhotacized to r. w:Verner's law means that voiced *z and voiceless *s alternated with each other according to factors such as the location of the accent at the time. In some cases the alternation was passed down to the present even after the accent changed, for instance was and were in English. Usually, though, the distinction was lost, with either s or r prevailing in a given language. As the pairing of English freeze with German frieren shows different languages made different choices about which was kept. G was regularly used to represent a y sound in Old English when followed by a front vowel such as e or i: the lack of cognates with a g sound and spellings such as morberian indicate that this is the case here. The other "berry", on the other hand, has cognates with g, such as German Berg. The Proto-Germanic reconstructions given confirm the difference: *bazjan for berry and *bergaz for mound or mountain.
• As for ylp, it would have to be a borrowing from a non-Germanic source to mean "wolf", since the word in Germanic languages universally has some derivative of the *f in Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. There's some peculiar variation between descendants of *p (such as Proto-Germanic *f) and descendants of *kʷ in different branches of the Indo-European family (see Proto-Indo-European *wĺ̥kʷos), but nothing that would give rise to an Old English p. I'm not sure exactly how it's related to {term|elpend|lang=ang}} but West-Saxon y tends to alternate with u in other dialects in the right environments, and there are forms such as Gothic ulbandus (which is cognate, even though it refers to camels rather than elephants) suggesting that a u is possible. As for appropriateness, elephants were definitely used in warfare in ancient times, and the original Greek passage uses forms of ἐλέφας (eléphas) instead of terms for wolves, so I don't see how ylp in this passage could mean "wolf" Chuck Entz (talk) 21:47, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

• Click on the column head Berry to guess how much the w:blackberry and the w:raspberry contribute to the genus w:Rubus. --KYPark (talk) 07:50, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

• You may be surprised by the following quotation from w:Rubus:

  The generic name means blackberry in Latin and was derived from the word ruber, meaning "red". --KYPark (talk) 08:55, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

It's very easy to copy a bunch of names and arrange them in a table, but most of those are irrelevant when speaking of the etymology in question. Aside from a handful of European species (blackberry, raspberry, cloudberry, perhaps one or two others) that the names originally applied to, these are pretty much all plants from other continents that were named centuries later after those species because they were reminiscent of those species, or were given analogous names on the model of those original ones. The vines themselves are called brambles, a name which goes back to Old English. I'm oversimplifying a bit when I talk of species, because the taxonomy of European brambles is very complex and only loosely related to the common names- I'll leave that to Wikispecies. This whole section has absolutely nothing to do with the etymology of mōrberiġe, so is mostly a waste of space. Chuck Entz (talk) 10:00, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Recall what I am asking most here for that etymology is the supporting citation that morberige is the right descendant of mor#Old English meaning (1) moor, and (2) mountain, perhaps originally meaning "mountain berry" or "bearberry" (equivalent to Swedish and Finnish for "blackberry") rather than the very mulberry. According to w:Morus (plant), "Black mulberry was imported to Britain in the 17th century in the hope that it would be useful in the cultivation of silkworms." The Old English morberige in the sense of mulberry was practically useless until then! --KYPark (talk) 16:21, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

And I'm saying that it was, in fact, used to describe Morus, just as the word ylp was used to describe the elephant. You're forgetting that much of Old English prose consists of translations or discussion of foreign texts such as the Bible and Classical philosophical works. I'm going to hunt down the original passages, and you'll see what I mean. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:52, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

All good luck, wholehearted! What I'm forgetting or unaware is a real surprise. Thanks for your advice indeed. --KYPark (talk) 09:09, 12 April 2012 (UTC)