Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass.
- Victor Hehn
- Date:
- 1891
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass. Source: Wellcome Collection.
435/530 page 435
![very weighty grounds. As to the origin of the cereals in general, we refer our readers to Humboldt (Ansichten tier Natur, i. p. 206, etc., ed. 3, Stuttgart, 1871) ; at present nothing more can be said on the subject than what is contained there. The ancient name for the primitive plough, which consisted of a pointed, crooked piece of wood, is in Lithuanian szaka, bough, tooth, prong, the end of a stag’s antlers ; Old Slavic sokha, piece of wood, stake ; and in the modern languages sometimes fork, gallows, but principally hook. Now as the Slavic s, Lithuanian sz, is sometimes derived from an original k, German /z, we may be allowed to identify the Gothic hoha, plough, Old High German huohili, with the Lithu- anian szaka and Slavic sokha. But hoha itself evidently belongs to the verb hahan, with a nasalized sub-form hangan (perhaps the long o arose from the suppression of the n), from which verb a multitude of expressions for the ideas “ crooked, angular, bend, joint,” etc., are derived : for example, the German haken, hook, hacke, heel, henge, hinge, henkel, handle, Old High Germ, hahhila, pot-hook, Greek kox^vi], kokkv$, os sacrum ; further developed with s: German h ticks e, hough, knee-cap, Latin coxa, huckle-bone, corner of the field-fence, Old Irish cos, Cambrian coes, with guttural dropped, hip or thigh, etc. With this agree several West-Finnish words, all indeed borrowed from Teutonic, but some of them—a fact observable in several other cases—before our Teutonic consonant-change took place ; Esthonian konks, hook, kook, tooth of a harrow, hook on a well, pot-hook; letter for letter the Gothic hoha, etc. That the Greek yvrjg at first meant nothing but a crooked piece of wood, a bent bone, we learn from the kindred words ra yv'ia, the knees, later, any limb ; yviog crooked ; yviow, to lame ; yvaXov, crookedness ; 'Ap^iyv-q^g, limping with both legs, the lame Hephaestos (not correctly explained by Welcker, Gr. Gotterl., 1,633), etc. So hoha was originally a crooked antler, a bent bough or bone, with which the soil was torn up. Ac- cordingly the Celtic words suh, sock, ploughshare, Old High Germ. seh, seek, French soc, cannot be related to the Slavic sokha. To the Slavo-German circle of culture belong also the Gothic hlaifs, bread, and quairnus, mill, millstone. Hlaifs, hlaibs (in all Teutonic dialects), Lithu. klepas, Lett, klaips, Slav, khlebu (in all Slavic languages) are the same as the Latin libum (“ undoubtedly for clibumf Corssen, Kritische Nachtrtige zur lateinischen Formenlehre, p. 36) and Greek K\if3avov, Kpifiavov. That the word, and therefore the art of baking bread, a late one everywhere, came to the Slavs from the Germans, is proved by the initial having suffered consonant-change in German fashion ; the Lithuanians, with whom the guttural aspirate is wanting, replaced it, as in similar cases, by the corresponding tenuis. The](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24874309_0435.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
