3

When learning Thai, I was amazed how modern Thai word "fish" is similar to Slavic word "to swim"

Thai: ปลา [plaː] "fish"
Lao: ປາ [pa᷅ː]"fish"

Ukrainian: плавати [ˈpɫɑvɑtɪ] "to swim"
Slovenian: plávati
Slovakian: рlávаt᾽

First, I looked into dictionaries of Slavic languages. Many, including Vasmer's Dictionary of Russian Language, refer Ancient Greek πλεῖν, but no further references leading to PIE/Sanskrit.

Then I looked into Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary and found that

Sanskrit: प्लवते [plavate] "to swim"

but again, no reference to "fish".

So, my question is, how to prove that Thai "fish" and Slavic "to swim" are related?

Community
  • 1
Be Brave Be Like Ukraine
  • 8,629
  • 9
  • 38
  • 66
  • 3
    your first step is to find 25 other words that appear to be relatives. –  Nov 06 '12 at 17:36
  • Pokorny gives the PIE etymon *pleu- 'flee, fly, run, flow, swim'. – Mark Beadles Nov 06 '12 at 20:19
  • 1
    Khmer, Burmese, and Vietnames words are often cognate to Thai and Lao words, though far less often than the latter two are cognate to each other. Anyway, it's one place to look for clues. – hippietrail Nov 12 '12 at 09:42
  • @Marjeta, this question is not about Slovenian. Your desire to help tagging questions worth the best appreciation, but I have strong feeling that such tagging has been done without reading the question. Your yesterday's suggested edit has been rejected by community. Now you suggest the same edit again. Is there any reason why it can be approved on the second try? – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine Jan 17 '14 at 16:02
  • Sorry, it has Slovenian language specifically mentioned, so I added a tag. Today I first thought I skipped this question, so I tagged it again. – Marjeta Jan 17 '14 at 16:40
  • I agree with you that it's not specifically about Slovenian, but more about Slavic languages in general. Slovenian, Slovakian, and Ukrainian are only given as specific examples of three Slavic languages. – Marjeta Jan 17 '14 at 16:45
  • @Marjeta, exactly. It is not about Ukrainian either. Each example can be effortlessly replaced with Czech plavat or Polish pływać, for instance. The rule of thumb of adding language-specific tags is whether or not it could help any future visitors to find relevant questions. – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine Jan 17 '14 at 16:54

3 Answers3

7

"How to prove" something that probably isn't true, is rather difficult.

According to this site, the Thai word has a solid etymology pla.A in proto-Tai-Kadai. If this is true (and I have no idea how reliable the site is, but it looks plausible) then the word is not a loanword from Sanskrit, and has no connection with the PIE root (unless you subscribe to one of the controversial super-grouping theories).

Colin Fine
  • 7,454
  • 22
  • 28
2

Being Thai, I'm pretty sure that the resemblance is merely coincidental. The words for "fish", and "swim" in Thai are:

fish: ปลา [plaː]
swim: ว่าย [wâːi]

Thai has a word for "fish" that was borrowed from Pali/Sanskrit:

มัจฉา [mát-tɕʰǎː]

which doesn't sound very close to the mentioned Slavic word.

I'm more curious in how words like "elephant", "avatar", "immortal", which Thai borrowed from Pali/Sanskrit as เอราวัณ [eː-raː-wán] อวตาร [à-wá-taːn] อมตะ [à-má-tàʔ], sound like in Slavic. (NOTE: The more common word for elephants, which is not a borrowed word, in Thai is ช้าง [tɕʰáːŋ].)

Miztli
  • 1,085
  • 1
  • 10
  • 21
Damkerng T.
  • 316
  • 1
  • 8
  • 1
    All Slavic languages have /slon/ or /u̯slon/ for "elephant", this has nothing common with word at any neighbour language family. Old-styled etymology treats this as borrowed Turkish /aslan/ "lion", but another hypothesis is for Tibete-Burman */slan/ "elephant", modern /sən/ (could be brought by elephant drivers). "Immortal" is /besmertnɨ/, /nesmertelni/, etc. (transcription outline is shown, without details) – Netch Nov 10 '12 at 14:12
  • 1
    PIE "nmrtnos" or the like (=> immortal, amata). – Anixx Nov 10 '12 at 15:02
  • The same root in Slavic but the negative particle added independently. – Anixx Nov 10 '12 at 15:08
  • @Netch: The sounds of /slon/, /slan/, or /sən/ is not very far from /chang/. Maybe they are relative. Perhaps Tibete-Burman could be the link then. Do you by any chance know the words "fish" and "swim" in Tibete-Burman? – Damkerng T. Nov 11 '12 at 00:30
  • I'm afraid you have misunderstood the question. I've not asked for ว่าย or other Thai words. Also, "avatar" and others are not in question since they came to Slavic languages from English. The only word in question is "ปลา" versus "plavati". – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine Nov 11 '12 at 05:25
  • 1
    @bytebuster: I really went sidetrack, admittedly. My apology. I just hoped to find some links between the two languages, which are no clear relatives. If it's only just for the word "ปลา" then I believe it's just coincidental. Anyway, the word "ช้าง" (elephant) suggests that there might be some links between the two languages via Tibete-Burman, I would say. – Damkerng T. Nov 11 '12 at 06:13
  • There many links, indeed. See this question, for example. However, sometimes it's hard to track whether it's a relation or just a coincidence. – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine Nov 11 '12 at 06:24
  • @DamkerngT.: that's not how relatedness works. The suggestion (and it is only a suggestion) is that the Slavic words slon etc might have been borrowed from some Tibeto-Burman language. If the Thai chang were also borrowed from Tibeto-Burman (a suggestion for which I have seen no evidence) this would not imply any relationship between Thai and Slavic except that they both would happen to have borrowed the same word. – Colin Fine Nov 12 '12 at 00:58
  • 1
    @ColinFine: I don't think anybody was arguing here that there's any relationship between Thai and Slavic. I read the question only as wanting to know about the connections via Sanskrit borrowings. – hippietrail Nov 12 '12 at 09:52
  • 1
    @Hippietrail: Maybe. It all depends what bytebuster intended by the word relative: this word is not normally used in this context, and I interpreted as meaning (genetically) related. – Colin Fine Nov 14 '12 at 01:46
  • @ColinFine: Ah yes that's a strange choice of words indeed for a native English speaker. I read it also as related but in the loose sense. Of course I would consider a borrowing to be genetically related but I'm not trained in linguistics so maybe linguists don't use related that way. – hippietrail Nov 14 '12 at 09:29
  • Linguists don't generally use related in that way. If words in two languages are related (in the way I mean) that implies that the languages themselves are related (have a common predecessor at some stage). Whereas if a word is borrowed it tells you that speakers of the two languages have been in contact at some point, but nothing else about the provenance or history of the languages – Colin Fine Nov 14 '12 at 12:39
0

Slavic plávati definitely related to English flow and float and derived from PIE pleu- (e.g. pleuti "swims").

Starling derives it from Eurasiatic ṗVlV "wash, flow". This does not support any theory because Thai languages do not belong neither to Eurasiatic not to a higher groupping of Nostratic.

Your idea would be much more probable if you found parallels between Russian and Greenlandic or Japanese.

You should note that there are many much more striking coincidences. For example, you would be surprised that English "strange" is not related to Russian "stranno" which means the same, and English "sport" is not related to Gothic "spords" which means "racing".

Anixx
  • 6,643
  • 1
  • 26
  • 38
  • 3
    I get the feeling you might have missed that bytebuster expects them to be related via Sanksrit, whence many Thai words were borrowed. – hippietrail Nov 12 '12 at 09:45