Besides a woman’s name, Ilya afaik is also the Russian word for a species of flower. But with the little I know of Russian, trying to approach the pronunciation to what I’d expect it to be, it sounds like the female form of Julius, Julia, if I was to pronounce by Norwegian logic, the language not being geographically too far from the Slav ones.
And it wouldn’t be the first name I see that changes for some random reason. For example, to my knowledge, the male name Tiago comes from a long line of mispronunciations starting at Jacob/Jacobus.
So going by that, it makes me think, could those two names, Ilya and Julius, be related? Or would their phonetic similarity be a coincidence?
It would be theoretically possible that Proto-Indo-European picked a Proto-Semitic personal name or vice versa; both languages coexisted, and interacted a bit, as shown by the PIE word *táwros “bull” (see Latin “taurus”) vs. PS root *ṯawr- “bull” (see Arabic ثَوْر ṯawr).
It could be also a PIE descendant borrowing the name for a PS descendant. Latin for example wasn’t shy of borrowing even common words from Punic, like mappa “map” (Hebrew still keeps a side-relative of that as ⟨מַפָּה⟩ mappā, “cloth/map”).
I just don’t think it’s the case for this specific pair of words. Ilya is cognate to Elias, it’s clearly a Christian name, while Julia has been in Latin for longer than Christianity.
Yo, 4 days late but I’d like to ask:
Do you think the PIE for Earth/Erde etc is related to PS Ardh/Eretz? They both have the same meaning and similar pronunciations, and with the Taurus Thawr thing, I see it being possible
Coincidence. The roots are quite different: PIE *h₁er- versus PS *ʔarṣ́-.
The reason they ended similar is that Proto-Germanic inherited this root with a suffix for stative nouns, as *h₁ertéh₂ (The word probably meant “grounded stuff” or similar, then later the ground itself.) That *t ended as /θ/ through Grimm’s Law, English kept it this way, German re-fortified it back to /d/.
Then in the Proto-Semitic side of the things, *ṣ́ was probably /ɬʼ/ or /t͡ɬʼ/. It’s probably lateral since back then, because the South Arabian languages kept it as /ɬʼ/; Hebrew and Arabic delateralised it to /t͡s/ and /dˤ/ respectively.
Thank you! Have had that question for a long time. Appreciate your linguistics content on Lemmy
You’re welcome! Note there’s !linguistics@mander.xyz for more “serious” stuff, like this. (Not that I’ll remove serious stuff from here, but still.)
Ah. Not sent to me (I think), but I must’ve misclicked when picking the community to post on, so gomennasorry~ 😣
Daijokay. Both comms could use more activity anyway :D