# Persian: سکندری



## Treaty

Hi,

_sekandari_ in Persian means "fall or stumble when walking". _Sekandar _is the Persian version of Alexander (the Great). However, I can't see any relation between Alexander and "to fall" (is there any legend about it?). 
On the other hand, "scandalise" (from Greek I suppose) is close to _sekandari_ in both pronunciation and meaning (in the methaphorical sense of stumbling). Again, I don't see a reason that this term with its methaphorical meaning had entered into Persian. 

What's the story behind _sekandari?

_Thanks.


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## Wolverine9

It could be connected to Alexander in an attempt to deride him for conquering Persia.  However, it's more likely to be related to the Sanskrit root _skand_- "to leap, jump" but also "to drop, fall down."  The Greek _skandalon _and the Latin _scandere _are also related, and the PIE base for these words is *_skand_- "to jump."


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## Treaty

Thank you,

I just wonder if it is a corruption of _sa*r*-andari_ (literally: head+into) as when someone falls and bumps the *head into* the ground. We still use "to go into sth by head" to imply bumping into something. Also, an archaic for is _beh-sar dar-aamadan_ (to *enter *with *head*).


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## asanga

Mackenzie's Concise Pahlavi Dictionary gives _škarwīdan _"to stumble", not likely to be confused with Middle Persian _Skandar _"Alexander" or _sar andar _"head into".

As Wolverine has said, it's from a PIE root; closely related words Grk. _skándalon _"a trap, something over which one stumbles" and Skt. _skandana _"failing to succeed, miscarrying". FWIW, Skt. √_skand_, does seem to have a martial sense "to expel, to force out in battle"---Skanda, the son of Shiva, is the Indian god of war. His name is explained as_ skandati śopayati daityān_ "He casts out the Daitya demons".

But Alexander "Protector of Men" comes from _aléksein_ "to ward off, protect" + _andros _"man". These also have identifiable PIE roots _aleq-_ "to ward off, to protect"  and _ner(-t)-, aner-, əner- _"man". Sanskrit cognates are _ārakṣa_ and _nara_; a Sanskrit calque of Alexander would be Ārakṣanara. Old Persian has _nar- _"man", but the (limited) online Old Persian dictionary doesn't give any descendant of *_aleq_-, which would have been _*raša. _Perhaps Middle & Modern Persian _rastan_ "to escape, to be saved" is related.


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## Wolverine9

asanga said:


> .
> But Alexander "Protector of Men" comes from _aléksein_ "to ward off, protect" + _andros _"man". These also have identifiable PIE roots _aleq-_ "to ward off, to protect"  and _ner(-t)-, aner-, əner- _"man".



Which sound does PIE "q" represent?  I've never seen "q" used in PIE reconstructions.

Also, how would you explain the development of MP _škarwīdan _to NP _sekandarī_? Despite the fact that the MP form is a verb, there still appears to be a significant difference between the two forms.


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## asanga

Wolverine9 said:


> Which sound does PIE "q" represent?  I've never seen "q" used in PIE reconstructions.
> 
> Also, how would you explain the development of MP _škarwīdan _to NP _sekandarī_? Despite the fact that the MP form is a verb, there still appears to be a significant difference between the two forms.


Q is used occasionally in Pokorny's _Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch._ Unfortunately there's no introduction or explanation of his notation. Perhaps it represents a voiceless uvular stop, from the time before it was believed that all plain velars were actually pronounced as uvulars. Köbler simply has *_alek_-.

_Sekandari_ looks like it could be a corruption of a common abstract noun derivation "past stem + ār". Mackenzie's dictionary doesn't give the past stem of _škarwīdan _(present stem is (_škarw-_) but if it's regular it would be _škarwd_-, giving _škarwdār_ as the Middle Persian abstract noun "stumbling", and _škarwdāri _as adjectival "stumbling". Modern Persian has undergone phonological simplification, and the verb is no longer used, so it doesn't seem far fetched that over time the original morphology of the word was forgotten, and reinterpreted as _sekandari _by analogy to a more well-known word, like the "groom" in Modern English bridegroom was misinterpreted as "attendant", instead of "man" from Old English _brȳdguma_.


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## Wolverine9

^ Doesn't it seem odd, though, that the NP form _sekandarī _appears to be more similar to the PIE root *_skand_- than the MP form _škarwīdan?_  The NP form could have been reinterpreted by analogy as you mentioned, which by chance made it more similar to the proto form and cognates, or perhaps the NP word is derived from Parthian or another Middle Iranian language.


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## asanga

You're probably right; I assumed from the OP's question that no verb descended from the PIE root survived into NP (or he would have recognized it), but I just checked an online NP dictionary, & apparently the verb does survive as شکرفیدن. The verb is not productive in NP noun formation, as I can't find the expected noun شکرفیدار (can Treaty or another native speaker confirm?). But yes, with this additional information, it's clear that سکندری is not the result of sound changes from MP, so it's likely a loan word from a cognate in another Iranian language.

This does seem strange, though, because Persian is famous for its word-building capacity. If there's a native verb, why isn't a verbal stem + abstract noun suffix the standard word for "stumbling"?


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## fdb

The past stem of MP škarwīdan is (Pahlawi) škarwīd, (Manichaean MP) iškarwest, not “škarwd”. In principle one could expect an actor noun *škarwīdār “stumbler”, but this is a long way from sikandarī.

The connection of Gk. skandalon “trap” with Skt. skand- “jump” and Lat. scando “ascend” has been around for a long time, but it is very difficult both semantically and phonetically (where did –al- come from?). Beekes, in his recent Greek etymological dictionary, considers skandalon to be either “pre-Greek” or a loanword from some unidentified IE language.

On the other hand, NP sikandarī is suspiciously like skandalon, especially given the widespread r/l fluctuation in Iranian languages. I wonder whether the Persian word is not borrowed (somehow indirectly) from the Greek one.


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## Treaty

Thank you, _

škarwīdan _(or _šekarfīdan_) is no longer used in Persian. As far as I know its most recent extant usage is in a 12c. Koran interpretation (Razi) as _škarfandeh _and _škrwfān _(not sure about pronunciation) for "fallen/sinful". However, it is reflected in 17th c. dictionaries. 

A related but more used word is _šakuḵīdan _with the same meaning (it is probably a corruption of _šekarfīdan_). It was used by Roudaki (10th c.) and an 11th c. lexicon (Asadi). It is also reflected in 17th c. dictionaries.

On the other hand, the earliest evidence for _sekandari _is in a 16th c. poem (Johari, cited in Dehkhoda). In addition, is there any evidence that it is pronounced as _*i*skandari_ (with _e _or _i _at the beginning)?. 

Anyway, these dates do not prove anything about their usage or borrowing. 

Overall, these are suggested so far:
- corruption of _škarwīdari_
- borrowed or local unchanged cognate of "scandal"
- related to an unknown story of Alexander (or someone named Iskandar). 

Besides, there were my commoner ideas (I had mentioned only one of them):
- a corruption in the second letter (k), unrelated to _šekarfīdan_: like _sar-andari_ or _sang-andari_
- related to _šekan_- (break) especially in its Sogdian form _skn_(_t_) (= broken, paralysed, in a sense of being unbalanced).


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## asanga

Cheung's _Etymological Dictionary of the Iranian Verb_ reconstructs proto-Iranian *_skarf_- "to stumble", and none of the Iranian languages he cites have the -_nd_- consonant cluster we're looking for. Interestingly, he also doesn't connect it to Skt. _skand_- "to jump", but to _skhal-_ "to stumble, to trip, to waver", nor to Grk. _skándalon_, but to _sphállomai _"to fall over, to be mistaken". Cheung and Beekes are colleagues at Leiden, so the decision to remove references to _skand-_ and _skándalon _as cognates in both dictionaries can't be a coincidence.

It's also interesting that the 12th c. Persian usage meant "morally fallen, sinful". The semantic shift from "physical stumbling" to "failure, moral offence, sin" seems to be very common. The Greek shift happened quite early: Attic _skandálēthron_ was still the tripping mechanism of a snare, used by Aristophanes in the Acharnians: σκανδάληθρ᾽ ἱστὰς ἐπῶν  "setting a snare of words". Koine _skándalon _in the Septuagint translates Hebrew miḵ·šōl "stumbling block", and by the New Testament it's already primarily "religious offence, a sin". This is how the word entered European languages. If _sekandari_ is a loan word from _skándalon_, it probably wasn't from post-NT Greek, as it refers exclusively to physical stumbling.

_šekan- _looks promising: maybe some confusion with words derived from the proto-Iranian roots *_skarf- _"to stumble" and *_skand_- "to break" can best explain this mess.

A final question for fdb: I didn't realize the suffix -_la _was so problematic in Greek. In Sanskrit we have the taddhita suffix -ilac with the sense of -matup "possessing x" (P. V.2.99-100), e.g. _piccham _"tail", _picchila _"having a tail". I'm not a linguist and only read Greek, but it seems like it has a similar formation; e.g. _stóma _"mouth" and _stōmúlos _"wordy, talkative". Is a hypothetical noun *_skánda _"a trip, a stumble" and fem. substantive _skandálē_ "a 'trippy' thing" implausible?


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## fdb

Much credit to Asanga for the well-informed comments. We have to do with three in my opinion totally unconnected roots:

First: Indo-Iranian *skhal- “to stumble, trip”, as in Skt. skhal-, then with labial extension MP škarw-, Parthian iskarf-, Sogdian ʼškrwβ, (early) NP šikarfīdan.

Second: Indo-Iranian *skand- “to jump”, as in Skt. skand- (no assured cognates in Iranian).

Third: Indo-Iranian *skandh- “to break”, as in Avestan scind-, MP present stem škend (Manich. MP škenn), past stem škast, NP šikastan, etc., possibly cognate with Skt. skandha- “(broken?) shoulder bone”.

Greek does indeed form adjectives with –l- and –r- suffix such as dei-l-os “fearful” and lamp-r-os “bright”. The (phonetic) problem with skandalon is the second –a-, and for that matter the first –a-, if Skt. skand- really comes from IE *skend-. More importantly: the leap from skand- “jumping” to skandalon “trap” is semantically a bit difficult. I should think that jumping over something is pretty much the opposite of falling into a trap.


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## Wolverine9

fdb said:


> as in Avestan scind-,



Do you mean _skind_- or does the /c/ represent a different sound?


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## fdb

c = English ch (palatal).


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## asanga

fdb said:


> Much credit to Asanga for the well-informed comments. We have to do with three in my opinion totally unconnected roots:
> 
> First: Indo-Iranian *skhal- “to stumble, trip”, as in Skt. skhal-, then with labial extension MP škarw-, Parthian iskarf-, Sogdian ʼškrwβ, (early) NP šikarfīdan.
> 
> Second: Indo-Iranian *skand- “to jump”, as in Skt. skand- (no assured cognates in Iranian).
> 
> Third: Indo-Iranian *skandh- “to break”, as in Avestan scind-, MP present stem škend (Manich. MP škenn), past stem škast, NP šikastan, etc., possibly cognate with Skt. skandha- “(broken?) shoulder bone”.



That seems to be the conclusion. So where does _sekandari _fit in? 



> Greek does indeed form adjectives with –l- and –r- suffix such as dei-l-os “fearful” and lamp-r-os “bright”. The (phonetic) problem with skandalon is the second –a-, and for that matter the first –a-, if Skt. skand- really comes from IE *skend-. More importantly: the leap from skand- “jumping” to skandalon “trap” is semantically a bit difficult. I should think that jumping over something is pretty much the opposite of falling into a trap.



Well, Sanskrit √_skand_ also means "to fall, to drop". From Bhaṭṭi's _Rāvaṇavadha _22.11: _syantvā syantvā divaḥ śambhor murdhni skantvā bhuvaṃ gatām_ / (Referring to the Ganges) "streaming streaming from heaven, having fallen on the head of Śiva, she flowed down to earth."

But I don't think the _skand_- in _skandálēthron _referred to the motion of_ falling into _a trap, but rather the _springing _of the snare itself (note that English also uses a verb meaning "to jump"). It originally referred only to the trigger mechanism in a snare; the Suda defines it as _ta en tais pagisin epikamp__ē__ xula _"the bent piece of wood in a trap". By synecdoche, it later came to refer to the trap as a whole. From the rest of the description, _apo tou sumpiptein kai kratein to empeson_, the Suda took it to be a deadfall trap:

http://www.survival.org.au/images/paiute.jpg

But I think it actually referred to a twitch-up snare:

http://knots.hostzi.com/traps-snares/twitch-up.gif

And note that in more sophisticated versions of the deadfall trap, the trigger stick is also bent and will "spring" the trap:

http://survivalindonesia.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/survival-skills-3.jpg


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