Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 September 24

= September 24 =

Generation
The Slavic (here Russian) word for "generation", поколение, unambiguously per dictionaries comes from the word колено, here meaning "kin", "tribe", with another (and more widespread) meaning being "knee". But I couldn't find which one came first in this context: the "kin" meaning or "knee" meaning? Was "knee" somehow related to kinship in колено and then in поколение?

Fun tidbit: this says that "the fact that the genitive case of Latin genu (knee) looks identical to Latin genus (origin) appears to be a coincidence. This extends to English generation, which comes from Latin genus (origin) through suffixation". Brandmeistertalk  16:44, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
 * According to Wiktionary, the meaning "knee" is original, and the meaning "lineage" is perhaps from an unrelated, homonymous root. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:29, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
 * The same pair of roots turning up in kin and knee (and in γένος and γόνυ). ColinFine (talk) 22:35, 24 September 2022 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth, the Finnish word for "generation", sukupolvi, literally means "family knee". The word polvi ("knee") can even be used on its own in some situations, such as jo toisessa polvessa ("already in the second generation"). I don't know if the etymology of the word comes from literal anatomical knees. J I P  &#124; Talk 12:15, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
 * This can hardly be a coincidence, but we should consider the possibility of semantic loans. Compare how the word sinus in the mathematical sense was introduced in Medieval English: as a semantic loan of a misunderstood Arabic word. Scholars may have created vernacular terms based on the mistaken idea that the Latin nouns genus and generatio derived from genu. The false friendship in Latin has been put forward as a possible etymological explanation of the second component in Dutch evenknie (someone's equivalent), ostensibly a compound of even + knie. (The first part is also seen in evenbeeld (spitting image)). --Lambiam 13:22, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Looked up the entymology in Polish, and it appears that both the "knee" sense" and the" generation" sense are derived from the meaning of the common root, which signified "limb or member" (both of a group and of the body) (see Polish "członek", "member").

Related is the word "człowiek", or "human being", which apparently originally meant something like a member of the extended family or household, and the English word "colon" (punctuation), which came from a Greek word also meaning "member". But NOT "colon" (intestine), which came from a similar, but unrelated Greek word.

Also, I mistakenly assumed that "pokolenie" (generation) was somehow derived from "koło" (wheel or circle), but that is not the case.

Celtic "clan" is not related, because it derives from the Latin word "planta" (plant). The P was changed to a C when it entered Celtic because the Celts who borrowed it could not pronounce "P".

About kin vs knee and cognates, this is a pure coincidence, and has nothing to do with the Slavic words mentioned above, which are not calques from Greek, Latin or Germanic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:195:C300:7C30:1D30:2E7F:E856:D2CC (talk) 21:22, 26 September 2022 (UTC)