Thomas Wier

This is not true though. Today the wine industry (including vineyards and the entire wine value chain) employs around 680k-700k people in the US; only around 60k of these are directly in vineyards. Coal at its peak in the 1920s employed around 800k-900k people.

In both Greek and Mesopotamian art, the κάλαθος and the 𒄭𒆷𒌅 ḫallatum became metaphors for prosperity, which is the origin of our modern notion of the cornucopia. Here for example is King Ashurbanipal of Assyria holding aloft a basket representing wealth:

The world's oldest intact basket was found in the Judean desert in Muraba’at Cave, dating to around 10,000 years before present.

In Greek the word is fairly old; it is already attested in the 5th century BCE play 'The Birds' by Aristophanes, but has no agreed upon origin; Beekes suggests it is 'pre-Greek'. A more plausible alternative is Akkadian 𒄭𒆷𒌅 ḫallatum, a kind of basket used to ship goods.

The Old Georgian word is in turn a late Byzantine borrowing from Greek κάλαθος, which probably referred to a specific type of basket with 'top hat' and a narrow base. Though few/no wicker originals survive, we see them depicted on ancient Greek pottery for storing wool:

In modern Georgian, most nouns that end in -a truncate in the genitive and instrumental cases:

NOM კაბა ḳaba 'dress'
GEN კაბის ḳabis
INST კაბით ḳabit

Something similar must have happened to კალათა ḳalata, but in reverse.

The modern word in -a represents a reanalysis of the Old Georgian form in -i. This is likely because early speakers heard the unfamiliar word in an inflected form like კალათისა ḳalatisa or კალათთა ḳalatta and interpreted it as truncating: ḳalat-i > ḳalat-isa >> ḳalat-a.

The word is first attested in an 11th century translation of Flavius Josephus' Jewish Antiquities: რამეთუ სჯული იყო იუდელთა მეკარვეობასა შინა ქონებად ითოეული კალათთა ფჳნიკითა და კიტრაჲთა 'For it was the rule amongst Jewish guards to have a basket of dates and cucumbers'

Weekly Georgian Etymology: კალათა ḳalata 'basket', from late Old Georgian ႩႠႪႠႧႨ ḳalati, from Greek κάλαθος basket, probably from Akkadian 𒄭𒆷𒌅 ḫallatum basket for transporting goods, from Sumerian 𒂁𒄬 hal pot, basket.

For those who want to follow me in a more visual format, I now also make my weekly post about Georgian historical linguistics on Instagram at: www.instagram.com/georgian_ety...

Why is this? That is because while humans cannot eat chaff, animals often can, and they are regularly used as fodder in animal husbandry. These practices began to spread to Central Asia and India some time in the 4th millennium BCE, and perhaps took with them their vocabulary:

Map illustrating the spread of domestic sheep rearing into southern Central Asia after the 4th millennium: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01083-y

The most likely answer is not the innovation of agriculture/animal husbandry in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, since here economic practices had developed long before reconstructible protolanguages came into being. Instead, it was probably the *spread* of such practices to Central Asia.

On the left, chaff that has been separated from the grain, on the right.

So it seems likely that a root that looked something like *tVb-/*tVp/*tVv- referring to the processing of grains into edible seed parts and inedible husks spread anciently over a region from Mesopotamia perhaps even all the way to East Asia. But what triggered this spread?

Something similar is even found in Dravidian languages for 'bran' or 'chaff':

Tamil taviṭu bran
Malayalam taviṭu bran
Telugu tavuḍu bran
Naiki tavṛ chaff

Within Altaic (or Altaioid) languages a similar root is also found in Turkic and Korean words for straw/chaff:

Tatar tuban
Uighur topan
Turkmen tɨpɨn
Kazakh topan
Middle Korean 딥 tìp (modern čip)

Despite its antiquity in Kartvelian, many languages across Eurasia and the Middle East bear similar roots. Several Semitic languages have the root, which may be loans from Akkadian 𒊺𒅔𒉈 tibnum:

Arabic تِبْن tibn straw
Aramaic ܬܒܢܐ teḇnā straw
Hebrew תבן teven straw

The word has a clear Kartvelian pedigree, though some of the sound-reflexes are irregular in Zan and Svan:

Megrelian თიფი tipi grass
Laz თიფი tipi grass
Svan ლითიე:ლ litiēl time for mowing

The Zan forms show long distance assimilation (t...b > t...p), while Svan shows lenition.

The word is first attested in the late 8th century martyrology of St Abo, Tbilisi's patron saint: და დადვეს იგი ქუეყანასა, და მოიღეს შეშაჲ და თივაჲ და ნაფთი 'And they laid [the body] on the earth, and got wood and hay and pitch'

Weekly Georgian Etymology: თივა tiva 'hay', from Old Georgian ႧႨႡႠ tiba to mow, from Georgian-Zan *tib- mow, from Kartvelian *tib- mow. Ancient Eurasian Wanderwort: Akkadian 𒊺𒅔𒉈 tibnum straw, chaff, Turkic *topon straw, Dravidian *taviḍ- chaff, Middle Korean 딥 tìp straw.

Yeah, for non-Kartvelian data I have been using Starostin's etymological database, which is out of date in many respects. Feel free to correct any errors that creep into these posts!

Mug shots of Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of conservative activist Charlie Kirk

In modern Georgian, although one can nowadays say ასასინი asasini 'assassin', this normatively refers to the medieval sect. There is no one standard word to refer to modern politically-motivated killings. One can say პოლიტიკური მკვლელი ṗoliṭiḳuri mḳvleli 'political killer':

In Uralic *kola and Dravidian *kol- we find roots like

Finnish kuole die
Hungarian hal die

Tamil kol kill
Telugu kollu kill

So if these families are not phylogenetically related, the Kartvelian root may be a result of some poorly understood ancient pattern of loans across the continent.

But across Eurasia, many ancient languages also had a similar root meaning to kill or die. Indo-European *gʷelH- leads to:

English kill
Greek βέλος missile, arrow
Russian жаль pity (orig. 'grave')
Armenian կեղ keł wound

In this correspondence set, the Svan form for 'man' has undergone palatalization of the initial *ḳ to /č̣/. The same sound-change occurred in the verb for 'kill'.

The root *ḳal-/*ḳl- is an old one in Kartvelian, as it has cognates in both Georgian and in Svan ჭაუ č̣aw. The Svan word under regular rules of palatalization and shift of *l > /w/:

*ḳal > *č̣al > ჭაუ č̣aw

Svan words are often disguised by sound-changes like this; cf. 'man':

The word is formally an agentive participle derived from Old Georgian კლვა ḳlva:

მ-კლ-ვ-ელ-ი
m-ḳl-v-el-i
AGT-kill-TH-PART-NOM

In modern Georgian, the /v/ undergoes metathesis with the previous /l/ to become მკვლელი mḳvleli.

Which translates: "I see how the murderers of Christ grope about in the dark but I see with the eyes of my heart"

The word is first found in texts like the 9th century translations of the homilies of John Chrysostom: ვხედავ, რამეთუ ქრისტჱს მკლველნი ესე ბნელსა შინა ეფეშუებიან, ხოლო მე თუალითა გულისა ჩემისაჲთა ვხედავ

The Murder of Caesar by Karl von Piloty, 1865

Weekly Georgian Etymology: მკვლელი mḳvleli 'murderer, assassin', from Old Georgian ႫႩႪႥႤႪႨ mḳlveli killer, participle of კვლა ḳvla kill, from Proto-Kartvelian *ḳal-. Possibly an ancient Eurasian Wanderwort: Indo-European *gʷelH- kill, Uralic *kola die, Dravidian *kol- kill.

This reflects a straightforward functional fact about fruit: they are seen not just for their fleshy outer rind for eating, they are also seen as a source for the seeds that become enveloped in it. Many, many languages around the world lexicalize this fact.

This early Zan form was a result noun *χw-il- meaning wrapped or enveloped. This semantic shift from a verb of growth to 'fruit' is very common across lgs:

Ukrainian plyd < PIE *pleh₂- fill
Latvian auglis < PIE *h₂ewg- grow
Old English wæstm < PIE *h₂weg- grow, enlarge

This helps to explain why Georgian preserves the /v/ in the verbs for wrapping like მოხვევა moxveva directly inherited from Georgian-Zan, but lacks it in the word for ხილი xili: it was borrowed only after the Megrelian or Laz source form lost the /v/.