# OCS: нꙑръ ‎- tower (Etymology)



## bragpipes

Anyone know the etymology of this Old Church Slavonic word?

It means tower, but I have not been able to find its etymology nor its descendents.  Are there any?


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## Sobakus

Vasmer proposes a connection with нырять – "to dive" parallel to норá, ныра – "hole, den" (there are variants with both e/o and u/ū gradation across Baltic and Slavic), so the original sense would be "hideout". Another possibility is a loan, but no source is given.


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## ahvalj

Trubachov (_Этимологический словарь славянских языков. Праславянский лексический фонд. Выпуск 26 (*novoukъ(jь)–*obgorditi) · 1999: _65) also mentions this etymology but rather regards it as a folk interpretation, instead he suggests that this word is borrowed from the Palaeo-European (Paleo-European languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) _*nūr/*nōr, _cp. Sardinian _narágne_ "tower or fortress of Palaeo-Sardinians" (Nuraghe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and Nuragic civilization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), _Νώρα_ (ancient fortress in Cappadocia) and _Nura_ (old name of Menorca).


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## bragpipes

ahvalj said:


> Trubachov (_Этимологический словарь славянских языков. Праславянский лексический фонд. Выпуск 26 (*novoukъ(jь)–*obgorditi) · 1999: _65) also mentions this etymology but rather regards it as a folk interpretation, instead he suggests that this word is borrowed from the Palaeo-European (Paleo-European languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) _*nūr/*nōr, _cp. Sardinian _narágne_ "tower or fortress of Palaeo-Sardinians" (Nuraghe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and Nuragic civilization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), _Νώρα_ (ancient fortress in Cappadocia) and _Nura_ (old name of Menorca).



I'm assuming the borrowing was done by Southern Slavs near the Mediterranean and then entered OCS > other Slavic languages.

I can't imagine there to be a lot of Paleo-European languages in Northern Europe by the time the Slavs migrated to Europe.

Do we know other Paleo-European words in Slavic?


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## Karton Realista

bragpipes said:


> I'm assuming the borrowing was done by Southern Slavs near the Mediterranean and then entered OCS > other Slavic languages.


Well, you could easily screw up dates with that hypothesis, maybe there weren't paleo-european languages when southern Slavs migrated? It was pretty late, after all. When Slavs moved there, natives were already hellenised and romanised, it probably had effect on their language. 
That's just a little divagation, sorry


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## bragpipes

Karton Realista said:


> Well, you could easily screw up dates with that hypothesis, maybe there weren't paleo-european languages when southern Slavs migrated? It was pretty late, after all. When Slavs moved there, natives were already hellenised and romanised, it probably had effect on their language.
> That's just a little divagation, sorry



That's what I'm thinking (that it was really late).  However, there might have been pockets of these languages (like Basque today), and/or the Slavs could have gotten these words indirectly via an intermediary language, from Greek or Latin.  That (2nd idea) is the way Persian got Pre-Greek words like διφθέρᾱ, through a Greek intermediary.  

Obviously, that would mean that at some time the word nyr/nur existed in Greek or Latin, which I don't know or claim to propose.


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## ahvalj

bragpipes said:


> I'm assuming the borrowing was done by Southern Slavs near the Mediterranean and then entered OCS > other Slavic languages.
> 
> I can't imagine there to be a lot of Paleo-European languages in Northern Europe by the time the Slavs migrated to Europe.
> 
> Do we know other Paleo-European words in Slavic?


Actually, any Indo-European language contains words that can't, first of all for phonetic reasons, be traced back to proto-Indo-European. Greek has probably thousands of them, Latin has at least hundreds, Celtic and Germanic have dozens to hundreds etc. In Slavic, we find a number of nouns (especially plant, animal and substance names) that are either absent in related languages or lack regular cognates across them, e. g. _erębъ, golǫbь, koprъ, makъ, mečь, mъnogъ, olьxa, rakyta, rębina, sьrebro, želězo_. That doesn't mean, of course, that they all need to have come from a single language or have been borrowed during the same period.

There is no evidence that Slavs originated outside Europe or left it to migrate back. That may depend on the definitions, but, as a palaeontologist, I can assure you that Europe in its present form is an objectively existing geological landmass separated from other parts of Eurasia by the Ural mountains (that arose after the collision of the palaeocontinents Laurussia and Kazakhstania), the Caspian sea and the Caucasus (that arose after the collision of the Eurasian and Arabian plates). During much of the last 100 million years, Western Eurasia (=Europe) was separated in the east by the Turgai strait (that often expanded into West-Siberian sea) and in the south by the Tethyan ocean (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Early_Eocene_Arctic_basin.PNG). 

The loanwords from the pre-Indo-European languages of any part of Europe could have entered proto-Slavic at any period of its existence, beginning with the split of proto-Indo-European. Moreover, words like "tower", "sword", "iron" could have been brought by merchants, wandering craftspeople, artists, invaders, captives or other kinds of travelers telling about the life abroad.


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## Primomattino

The book of I. Sreznevsky "Матерiалы для словаря древне-русскаго языка" vol. 2, col. 482, contains a lot of words with the same root. It seems to be slavonic. But there is one rather unusual form used in a manuscript of 13 century: НЫРАЙ = tower. May be, this root has a dual origine, slavonic (НЫРИТИ, НЫРЯТИ - to dive, seek, hole up) and paleo-european (mentioned by ahvalj).


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## ahvalj

Primomattino said:


> The book of I. Sreznevsky "Матерiалы для словаря древне-русскаго языка" vol. 2, col. 482, contains a lot of words with the same root. It seems to be slavonic. But there is one rather unusual form used in a manuscript of 13 century: НЫРАЙ = tower. May be, this root has a dual origine, slavonic (НЫРИТИ, НЫРЯТИ - to dive, seek, hole up) and paleo-european (mentioned by ahvalj).


Could you please sketch out the steps of the development "to dive" → "tower"? I can only imagine something like this: http://fasadnews.ru/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2.по-форме-напоминает-соседние-скалы.jpg


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## mintster

Diving and towers seem to be completely opposite things.  

Do Slavic languages have a (relatively) low(er) frequency of homonyms than other languages?  

In many discussions on Slavic word origins, etymologies are proposed based on the similarity or identicality of the sound, whereas discussions in many other languages would start with the premise that two words can have the same sound but different etymologies and go from there.

No one would propose that meat and meet come from the same origin.   Even though we now do call the offline world "meatspace" - the space where meats (people) meet. 

Having that said, the only possibility for the two "ныр"s to be related is ныр as a den > trench > walled trench > tower.   In English we do say "holed up" meaning behind defensive structures and even "holed up in a tower."    That's for digging.  The problem is diving into water is something else entirely.   Connecting going deep into water and a stone tower is a stretch to say the least.


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## Primomattino

У Срезневского значения примерно десятка слов входят в такой круг: забираться внутрь, проникать, прятаться, укрываться. Первое значение, вероятно, было именно "проникать внутрь". Оно связывает и погружение в воду, и укрытие в башне, и даже проворство, хитрость. "Проныра" - тот, кто иными словами говоря, везде пролезет без мыла. НЫР - в таком случае, убежище, укрытие. То последнее место, где могут рассчитывать на спасение защитники крепости.


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## ahvalj

Checking the abovementioned _Этимологический словарь славянских языков. Праславянский лексический фонд. Выпуск 26 (*novoukъ(jь)–*obgorditi) · 1999_ reveals the following connections for the verb:

_nyrěti_ (with the secondary _nyriti,_ p. 64) → its iterative _nyŗati_ (p. 65) and the late form (for phonetic reasons: _yrn_ isn't the combination normally found in Slavic words) _*nyrnǫti_ (p. 65)
_
nuriti_ (p. 45) → its iterative _nuŗati_ (p. 46) and the late form (for the same phonetic reasons) _*nurnǫti._​
The morphological relationships of _nyrěti_ (from *_nūrē-_) and _nuriti_ (from _*nau̯rī-_) are standard — former (lengthened) zero grade in the _ě_-verb : former _o_-grade in the _i_-verb, and remind e. g. _dyšati_ (from _*dūxē-_) : _dušiti_ (from _*dau̯xī-_).

The meanings attested in various languages (including dialects) are mentioned as follows (I can't find the exact English meanings for all cases, so sorry for the inevitable mistakes):

_nyrěti~nyriti — _Church Slavonic "to immerge", Serbo-Croatian "to lean out; to look into", Old East Slavic "to sink; to rush; to swim underwater; to lie", Russian "to spy out; to search; to thrust one's nose; to do in a hurry; to miss somebody/something";
_
nyŗati — _Church Slavonic "to immerge", Old East Slavic and Old Russian "to swim underwater; to dive; to pass out of sight", Russian "to dive; to hide onseself", Ukrainian "to dive", Belarusian "to dive";
_
*nyrnǫti — _Bulg. "to dive", Old East Slavic "to whisk, to plunge", Russian "to dive; to hide"; Ukrainian "to dive";
_
nuriti (sę) — _Church Slavonic "to profit, to turn to advantage", Bulgarian "to dig the dirt (about swines)", Serbo-Croatian "to push into; to climb, to penetrate", Czech "to dive; to fight", Slovak "to dive; to spy; to poke the snout in the soil; to read", Upper Sorbian "to sink; to submerge", Lower Sorbian "to dive, to sink, to submerge", Polish "to sink; to moisten, to soil; to become angry", Old East Slavic "to expend, to exhaust", Russian "to exhaust, to tire; to speed on (the horse); to hasten; to live in want; to force; to warm up; to grieve (about the cattle)";

_nuŗati — _Bulg. "to submerge, to dive, to climb; to dig the dirt (about swines)", Maced. "to touch, to search", Serbo-Croatian "to push, to poke; to climb, to get into", Czech "to search, to spy", Slovak "to dig, to search; to spy; to dive", Polish "to work, to search in the dark; to sink; to baptize by sinking in water", Ukrainian "to dive; to sink";
_
*nurnǫti — _Bulg. "to dive", Maced. "to dive; to sway", Serbo-Croatian "to push slightly; to force to work", Lower Sorbian "to dive".​
So, the meaning "to dive, to immerge, to swim underwater" seems to be central, and the development "to hide" metaphorical. The towers are built with purpose, as strongholds, not as places where one can whisk into in case of danger.


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## ahvalj

mintster said:


> Do Slavic languages have a (relatively) low(er) frequency of homonyms than other languages?
> 
> In many discussions on Slavic word origins, etymologies are proposed based on the similarity or identicality of the sound, whereas discussions in many other languages would start with the premise that two words can have the same sound but different etymologies and go from there.
> 
> No one would propose that meat and meet come from the same origin.   Even though we now do call the offline world "meatspace" - the space where meats (people) meet.


Slavic (like Baltic, Germanic and many extinct languages of Europe) was developing in isolation from the ancient centers of literacy, so in most cases it is simply impossible to base the study of the history of its words on anything but the sound correspondences.

The oldest Slavic texts (of the 9–11th centuries) don't seem to reflect any ancient literary tradition: the language looks rather uniform and its words are rather transparent, which means that in the previous period(s) common Slavic was rather active in eliminating the old forms and words — that was probably related to the social perturbations intrinsic to the migration periods when old people, bearers of the tradition, left at home, and youngsters went forward to settle in new lands.


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