Re: Finishing Crystal

On 3/01/2025 10:53 a.m., Ross Clark wrote:

On 1/01/2025 2:21 p.m., HenHanna wrote:

On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 20:22:48 +0000, Ross Clark wrote:
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[snip]

So Happy A'phabet Day and "Vitin e ri!"
to all at sci.lang.
Ross

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"Vitin e ri!" -------- Do lots of Ling-buffs know this lang, or phrase?

 I couldn't say. It's Albanian, the first item on the 50-language list.
The meager Albanian language resources within a 1m range of my keyboard tell me that _vit_ means 'year' and _(i) ri_ means 'new'.
 

is this Vitin  cognate with French  venir ?

 No. According to Buck 1940 there's a PIE *wet(es)- which gives us:
     Greek (w)etos  'year'
     Sanskrit vatsa-  'calf (yearling)'
         tri-vatsa-  'three years old'
     Albanian vjet  'year'
and might be connected with Latin vetus 'old'.
Watkins 2000 adds English wether  (Germanic *wethruz) and Latin vitulus 'calf, yearling'.
 

The -in is apparently accusative, so it's just "new year" (object), with no "happy".
It might be like the Russian С новым годом! which is supposed to be a reduction of a longer phrase, something like "[I greet you] with the new year!".