Coincidence.
One comes from Latin/Greek, the other from ancient Hebrew.
Do they perhaps have a shared origin in PIE?
Dunno what the acronym PIE is, but going by the religious examples, vpol's comment makes me think, didn't a few names get from Hebrew to Latin through the Greeks?
Proto-Indo-European. Hebrew being a Semitic language from an area mostly full of other Semitic languages makes me think it's unlikely to have picked up a PIE name though
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
It's coincidence.
Ilya: from Russian Илья (Ilya), borrowed from Greek Ἠλίας (Ēlías), borrowed from Hebrew אֱלִיָּה (Eliyáh). It's typically a male name, although in English I wouldn't be surprised if people named some women "Ilya" because it ends in -a. I'm not aware of any flower with this name, but I don't speak Russian, so take it with a grain of salt.
Note Christian names in Russian often follow this same "double borrowing", just like Christian names in English most of the time follow a Hebrew → Greek → Latin (> French) → English path instead.
Julia: feminine of Julius, from Latin Iulius. The etymology is disputed, but apparently it comes from Iouilius (lit. "Jupitery", i.e. associated with the god Jupiter). Either way it's older than Christianity, and actually native in Latin, not borrowed.
Also, it wasn't a personal name in Classical times. It was a gens name; roughly a surname. That Julius Caesar for example was from the gens Julia, and his personal name was Gaius.
For a better example of weird etymological cognates: Ivan vs. John vs. Giovanni. They all ultimately backtrack to Hebrew יוֹחָנָן (Yoḥānān).
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.
The key change here was rebracketing, the same change that transformed English "a napron" into "an apron". To explain it further:
Names of saints in Galician, Portuguese and Spanish are preceded by "Santo" (M) or "Santa" (F), but:
I'll give you some examples (from Portuguese for my own convenience):
Now, back into "Tiago". You got Latin borrowing the Greek borrowing of the Hebrew name יַעֲקֹב (Ya'akob). In Latin it became Iacob, Iacobus, Iacomus (yup, it was a mess.) That "Iacob" form evolved naturally into "Iago" into those languages. (Spanish also spells it as Yago.) Right?
But he was a saint. So you got to add "santo" to his name. It falls into the first case there, since the name starts with vowel: Santo Iago ~ Santiago. But there are so many versions of the name that people lost track of what it was supposed to be, so they interpreted it as "san Tiago" instead of "santo Iago". Then you get people naming their children after saints, and the name Tiago pops up.
Wow. Thanks for the explanation!
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