# Proto-Germanic *sebun "seven" & Akkadian sebe "seven"



## CyrusSH

According to "Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary, page 2624", Akkadian _sebe_ and other Semitic words for "seven" are from an Indo-European language, is this language proto-Germanic?


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## inquisitiveness1

Firstly, the Proto-Semitic word most likely isn’t borrowed from Proto-IE (aside from just sheer lack of evidence, where did the IE “t” and nasal sound go and where did the phyrangeal fricative come from?), and likely even has a cognate in Ancient Egyptian _sfḫw _“seven”, which would imply Proto-Afroasiatic descent.

Secondly (and someone correct me if I am somehow mistaken), Proto-Germanic didn’t exist when Proto-Semitic was still around, so of course no words in Proto-Semitic could be borrowed from Proto-Germanic.


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## CyrusSH

I myself also think that the proto-Semitic word isn’t borrowed from proto-IE, in fact this similarity exists just in proto-Germanic and Akkadian words and those who claim it is a loanword from proto-IE should answer your questions, where did the IE “t” go, both in proto-Semitic and proto-Germanic?


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> are from an Indo-European language


That is not what Pokorny writes. The weird English "translation" you seem to be using reads: "It seems that number seven spread from PIE to Semitic numeric system". I.e. it assumes it is from PIE itself and not from "an Indo-European language".

In Pokorny's dictionary itself there is no such claim: p.909.


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## fdb

A connection between IE *septṃ and Semitic *s¹abʻ has been floating around in the grey zone of historical linguistics for a long time. But why would anyone borrow just one number?


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## CyrusSH

fdb said:


> A connection between IE *septṃ and Semitic *s¹abʻ has been floating around in the grey zone of historical linguistics for a long time. But why would anyone borrow just one number?



This similarity can be seen in proto-Germanic _*sehs_ "six" and Akkadian _šeš_ too, whereas the proto-IE word for "six" is *_wéḱs_.


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## fdb

The proto-Semitic word for “six” is *s¹idϑ.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> whereas the proto-IE word for "six" is *_wéḱs_.


That is certainly not consensus view.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> That is certainly not consensus view.



It certainly meaningless to say there were different words for "six" in proto-Indo-European, in fact non of PIE words for "six" can explain the Iranian word.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> It certainly meaningless to say there were different words for "six" in proto-Indo-European, ...


Nobody ever said there were several words for _six_. The debate is what  the original word was, whether the origin is *s_wéḱs _or whether the _s_ is a later addition in some branches copied from the_ s_ in _seven_.


CyrusSH said:


> ...in fact non of PIE words for "six" can explain the Iranian word.


Is that wishful thinking again? Or on what do you base that verdict?


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Nobody ever said there were several words for _six_. The debate is what  the original word was, whether the origin is *s_wéḱs _or whether the _s_ is a later addition in some branches copied from the_ s_ in _seven_.
> 
> Is that wishful thinking again? Or on what do you base that verdict?



If the proto-IE word begins with _sw_ then the Iranian word should begin with _xʷ_, otherwise it should be _w_ but we see none of them in the Iranian word.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> If the proto-IE word begins with _sw_ then the Iranian word should begin with _xʷ_, otherwise it should be _w_ but we see none of them in the Iranian word.


Iranian_ xṣ̌-_ (Avestan & Old Persian) from PIE *_sw-_ seems sufficiently plausible to me. But we should ask @fdb if that makes sense.


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## fdb

Pokorny 1044, followed by Emmerick, suggested PIE *ksweḱs, which would neatly explain Iranian xšwaš (Avestan xšuuaš).

Alternatively (Hoffmann, Mayrhofer) PIE *sweḱs > *swaš > *šwaš (assimilation) > xšwaš (secondary x before š).


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## Delvo

fdb said:


> A connection between IE *septṃ and Semitic *s¹abʻ has been floating around in the grey zone of historical linguistics for a long time. But why would anyone borrow just one number?


This involves two separate components, only one of which I think is really crucial for your question. One is the replacement of a word for a number with some unrelated word, and the other is about that "new" one (actually an old word the language already had, just given a new use) having once been imported from some other language. But words getting imported is trivial, and once it's done, that "new" word is available to go through any and all internal processes of the language that imported it. So your question is really "why would they replace a word for a number with some other word", with the fact that that "other word" was once imported not really being important to the process. And the answer to why a number would be replaced with an unrelated root is: Because that number is associated with some other concept which makes it special and affects its meaning; the new word would at first refer only to that special application of the number, but could then undergo a semantic shift.

For example, English has "dozen" along with "twelve" because a dozen is a special application of twelve. So it would only take a fairly small semantic shift for people to start saying "adozen" in situations where we normally say "twelve" today. (And "dozen" was imported from French.)

A more drastic case is "two", which coexists with "pair", "couple", "second", "duo", and "double", all from different roots except for the last two (and all imported!), and German even uses its cognate of "other" as part of the group, too, meaning "second" (a good example of an even bigger semantic shift than what we need here, from a non-numerical meaning to a numerical one). On top of that, two's fraction (half) is the only one that can't be referred to by the same word as its ordinal (second). With so many unrelated roots for such similar meanings floating around in one language, if a semantic shift brought any of them (except "half", which wasn't imported) into the primary position that "two" now occupies, then it would appear that we had imported a word for "two".

An example in Hebrew is that 49 of something is referred to at least once in the Bible as "a sabbath of sabbaths", clearly using "sabbath" as the number 7 while also emphasizing the religious importance of the 49 things. (And I think the things were even years, not days!) Take away the religious importance, and you have just another word for "seven", which originated not as a number but as the verb for "rest". Of course, any linguistic contact between PIE and a Semitic language or Proto-Semitic would be so long ago that there's no sign of the number 7 having had that kind of cultural significance back then, a few millennia before the development of anything we could recognize as the Jewish religion, and an even longer time than that before Semitic religions really mattered to Indo-European people. So this wasn't a proposal for anything specific about the history of the word "seven", but it was an example of the kind of thing that could in theory lead to number-word replacement.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> Pokorny 1044, followed by Emmerick, suggested PIE *ksweḱs, which would neatly explain Iranian xšwaš (Avestan xšuuaš).
> 
> Alternatively (Hoffmann, Mayrhofer) PIE *sweḱs > *swaš > *šwaš (assimilation) > xšwaš (secondary x before š).


The Lithuanian _šeštas_ "sixth", Latvian _sests_ and Slavic _šestъ_ agree in _*ṣeśtas<**ksekʲstos _as in Iranic. Prussian has _usts~uschts_ (with _š<*sʲ<*sj_ apparently taken from the unattested cardinal "six") _<*uśtas<**ukʲstos_.


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## fdb

ahvalj said:


> The Lithuanian _šeštas_ "sixth", Latvian _sests_ and Slavic _šestъ_ agree in _*ṣeśtas<**ksekʲstos _as in Iranic. Prussian has _usts~uschts_ (with _š<*sʲ<*sj_ apparently taken from the unattested cardinal "six") _<*uśtas<**ukʲstos_.




Iranian similarly has forms without -w-, like *kseḱs > *xšaš > NP šaš.


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## CyrusSH

fdb said:


> Pokorny 1044, followed by Emmerick, suggested PIE *ksweḱs, which would neatly explain Iranian xšwaš (Avestan xšuuaš).



How it was changed to _*ṣvaṭ_ in Indian?!


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> Iranian similarly has forms without -w-, like *kseḱs > *xšaš > NP šaš.


Some Middle and New Indic languages also seem to continue the form with an initial consonant cluster, cp. Pali _cha_ and some of the New Indic outcomes — षष् - Wiktionary


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## Treaty

Here is an article about different Indian forms.


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## ahvalj

Treaty said:


> Here is an article about different Indian forms.


Yes, thank you, that seems to explain the _ch._ Yet, as to the origin of _k- _within Iranic alone, I wouldn't be so sure: the East Baltic and Slavic forms definitely can't be explained from _s- _(and there is no development of _k-_ before _š- _in these groups anyway), and overall the anlaut of the word for "six" looks much restructured across the daughter lineages of Indo-European.


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## ahvalj

CyrusSH said:


> How it was changed to _*ṣvaṭ_ in Indian?!


Something like _*-kʲs>*-ʨɕ>*-ṭṣ>-ṭ,_ e. g. _*u̯ikʲs _"village" _> viṭ _(Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/wíĉš - Wiktionary); likewise *_hₓrēgʲs _"king" _> rāṭ_ (Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/Hrā́ĵs - Wiktionary).


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## CyrusSH

ahvalj said:


> Something like _*-kʲs>*-ʨɕ>*-ṭṣ>-ṭ,_ e. g. _*u̯ikʲs "house"> viṭ _(Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/wíĉš - Wiktionary); likewise *_hₓrēgʲs _"king" _> rāṭ_ (Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/Hrā́ĵs - Wiktionary).



I meant what happened to the initial _k_ sound?


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## ahvalj

CyrusSH said:


> I meant what happened to the initial _k_ sound?


But this _k-_ was a local innovation (cp. even within Baltic the Lithuanian _šeštas_ vs. Prussian _usts _without any consonant before _u_), so it wasn't necessarily present in Indic.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> But this _k-_ was a local innovation


That is actually the question we are discussing (see #13). Pokorny thought it was PIE original.


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## CyrusSH

ahvalj said:


> But this _k-_ was a local innovation (cp. even within Baltic the Lithuanian _šeštas_ vs. Prussian _usts _without any consonant before _u_), so it wasn't necessarily present in Indic.



Other than Semitic, Kartvelian words for "six" and "seven" are also similar to IE words, Prussian _usts_ is similar to Svan _usgw_ from proto-Kartvelian *_ekśw-_. Iranian *_xšwaš_ can be from the same origin too.


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## fdb

berndf said:


> Pokorny thought it was PIE original.



Or at least one of several PIE variants. PIE is not monolithic.


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## francisgranada

fdb said:


> But why would anyone borrow just one number?


Instead of answering the question "why?", I give you two existing examples:

1. The Hungarian words for 7 and 10 are supposed to be borrowings from Old Iranian, while the rest of numerals are of Finno-Ugric (1-6) or Ugric (8) and proper (Old) Hungarian (9) innovations.

Partial explanation: As the situation is similar in all the FU branch, it is supposed that the Finno-Ugric / Uralic(?) peoples used originally a _hexal _numeric system (root 6) and the decimal system was introduced later, under the influence of IE languages. However, why only the words for 7 and 10 are borrowings and not all the four (7,8,9,10)? I don't know ...

2. In the Romani (Gypsy) dialects spoken traditionally in Central Europe, the numerals from 1 to 10 are of Indo-Irian origin, except of  7,8,9, which are borrowings from Greek. Even more, nowadays in modern Romani spoken in Slovakia, the words for numerals 7 and higher are mostly replaced by the corresponding (dialectal) Slovak terms. Why _these _and not the others? ...

(The number 7 seems to have some mystical power ....)


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## CyrusSH

francisgranada said:


> Partial explanation: As the situation is similar in all the FU branch, it is supposed that the Finno-Ugric / Uralic(?) peoples used originally a _hexal _numeric system (root 6) and the decimal system was introduced later, under the influence of IE languages.



As I said in the post which was deleted, ancient Indo-Europeans probably used a pentimal numeral system, PIE word for "ten" actually means "two five fingers", it seems the word for "eight" also means "two four fingers".


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## rushalaim

CyrusSH said:


> As I said in the post which was deleted, ancient Indo-Europeans probably used a pentimal numeral system, PIE word for "ten" actually means "two five fingers", it seems the word for "eight" also means "two four fingers".


Romans had 5-numbered system, Greek music has 8-numbered system "octavus" or "diapason", Egyptians had 10-numbered system (presents in the Pentateuch), Babylonians had 12-numbered system of time and Zodiacus (presents in the Bible)
Octave - Wikipedia


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