Wanderwort

A hiking word is a word that has spread to different languages ​​and cultures (often in conjunction with trade ), so that its etymology, or even the language from which it originates, can not be clearly established. The separation between migrant words and loanwords is not clearly possible. Hiking words can be seen as a kind of foreign words.

Typical examples of hiking words are ginger, cumin and tea, some of which can be traced back to the Bronze Age Mediterranean trade. Also for hiking words, there may be commonly accepted theories about its origin. However, these are difficult or impossible to prove due to the age of these words, such as the theory of the ultimate Chinese origin of tea, which is based on the linguistic analysis, that the word has many counterparts in China and strong phonetic change was going through.

Some ancient loanwords are connected with the spread of writing systems. An example of this is the Sumerian musar, Akkadian musarum " document, seal", apparently borrowed from Urindoiranische as * mudra " seal" ( Middle Persian muhr, Sanskrit mudrā ). Some even older, Late Neolithic hiking words have been proposed, such as the Sumerian gu -, PIE. gwou " ox "; or the Sumerian balag, Akkadian pilaku, PIE. pelek'u " ax ". However, in Akkadian means pilakku - rather " spindle", and Sumerian balag is correctly transcribed as balaĝ ( ų stands for [ ŋ ] ), means " a large drum or harp " and was the Akkadian balangu - borrowed as. In addition, the Sumerian word for " ox " is really gud while gu4 only a secondary pronunciation variant (that is d is not pronounced when no vowel follows, but is the original part of the lexeme, so its phonological form, cf the French Liaison ).