Dirk Bilker wrote:
> For a long time I have been intrigued by the mysterious relationship
> between the words eight and night. In almost (?) all Indo-European
> languages the rule is: n + 8 = night. The peculiar thing of course is
> that this is true for Germanic as well as Latin oriented languages. See
> the following list:
> English eight night
> French huit nuit
> Spanish ocho noche
> Italian otto notte
> Portuguese oito noite
> Rumanian opt noapte
> German acht Nacht
> Dutch acht nacht
> Swedish atta natt
> Danish otte nat
> Norwegian atte natt
> Esperanto ok nokto
> I can think of no other words that behave like this. House and mouse go
> a long way in Germanic languages (Haus Maus, huis muis, hus mus), but in
> French or Spanish it's a different story.
> Is there a linguist who can shed some light on the origin of this
> strange phenomenon?
Well, you're going to get flamed from folks pointing out that selections
from two IE families is far from "almost all" IE languages! You're
looking at only two developments from the IE root, the Romance and the
Germanic (not 11 separate developments). As it happens, Buck's
dictionary says:
"Most of the words for 'night' belong to an inherited group, pointing
clearly to an IE word for 'night'. In Irish, except for an adv. relic,
and in Indo-Iranian, except in Vedic and a classical Skt. adv. relic,
the old word was displaced by others, but elsewhere has persisted as the
usual word to the present day" (p. 992)
"No class of words, not even those denoting family relationship, has
been so persistent as the numerals in retaining the inherited words.
Except for some suffix-variation and actual substitution in the case
of 'one', the IE words for 'one' to 'ten' have persisted everywhere with
only slight changes other than phonetic" (p. 936)
Thus you happen to have come across a couple of words that haven't been
replaced and that coincidentally started out with similar forms and
underwent all the regular changes through time. I'm sure you could find
lots of other pairs of words that rhyme across lots of families.
Words for "house" come from roots with various relevant meanings in the
different families, including 'roof', 'stopping place', built thing',
and 'cave'; words for 'mouse' (as often with animal etc. names) come
from names earlier applied to various small critters. (But the IE roots
of "house" and "mouse" rhyme, too!)
--
Peter T. Daniels gramma...@worldnet.att.net
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