Talk:Puck (mythology)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is supported by WikiProject Mythology .
This project provides a central approach to Mythology-related subjects on Wikipedia. |
|
| Start | This article has been rated as start-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.) |
|
 |
Puck (mythology) is part of WikiProject Middle Ages, a project for the community of Wikipedians who are interested in the Middle Ages. For more information, see the project page and the newest articles. | ||
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. | ||
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale. | ||
|
Article Grading: |
|||
|
WikiProject Middle Ages To do:
|
|||
Wouldn't one of the other spellings be more useful to someone looking for this? Sean Griffing
- One supposes that Sean Griffing did some #REDIRECT pages . As for this Maureen Duffy claims that “puck” is cognate with “fuck”, as is the word “poke”. One can't help add:" And why not "fake" and "puke"? As well as "fickle"." Wetman 04:33, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Celtic and Old Norse
This sentence in the article:
- Puck's origins may lie on an even deeper language layer, before the Celtic and North Germanic language families split.
is nonsense. That is to say, it is impossible that any word inherited from the common ancestor of Old Norse and Celtic would look as similar in Old Norse and Celtic as puki and pwcca do: Germanic p and k correspond to Celtic b and g. If words that look that similar in Germanic and Celtic are related, they must be comparatively recently borrowed in one direction or the other. Unless someone can propose a rewrite, I'm just going to delete the offending sentence wholesale. AJD 05:30, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- Rewrite it to suit your own POV. But don't suppress the factual information: the O.E.D. does in fact debate whether the origin is Germanic (Old Norse puki) or Celtic (Welsh pwcca and Irish pooka), okay? Just because it doesn't suit your POV. But do draw more justified conclusions: interesting that you say it's "impossible." Do you disagree with the compilers of the O.E.D. too? Quote some sources won't you. --Wetman 05:55, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
-
- OED doesn't say that Welsh pwca and Norse puki are commonly inherited from the mutual ancestor of Celtic and Germanic, which is what the sentence that I take issue with implies. It says that it is unknown which branch borrowed the word from the other, which is exactly the opposite of that implication. AJD 07:08, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- OED says nothing of "borrowing' but offers cognates in languages that most people recognize as in separate Indo-European groups. AJD has made the following sensible edit: " According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of the name Puck is "unsettled", and it is not even clear whether its origin is Germanic (cf. Old Norse puki,) or Celtic (Welsh pwca and Irish púca). " But AJD, brimming with self-confidence, forbids the following logical thought: Puck's origins may lie on an even deeper language layer, before the Celtic and North Germanic language families split.' Why should this conditionally offered possibility be censored? Is not a deeper language layer always a natural possibility when cognates appear in long-separate languages? Perhaps a moment's consideration of the Indo-European family tree might enlighten our censor. --Wetman 08:23, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
-
- OED says "the question whether it was originally Teutonic or Celtic, is unsettled." That sentence—the implicit claim that it was originally one or the other—is only consistent with borrowing. If it were a common inheritance, it would not be originally one or the other; it would belong to both equally since its origin.
-
- And regarding the question "Is not a deeper language layer always a natural possibility when cognates appear in long-separate languages?": No. It is only a possibility when the words in the separate languages obey the sound laws of their respective languages. For example, we can know that the English name Jove and the similar Italian name Giove for the sky god cannot be a common inheritance from Indo-European, for the following reason: sound change is regular, and no Indo-European sound that evolved in Italian into Gi evolved into English J. If an Italian word with Gi has an English cognate, that cognate must begin with T or K. So either Jove or Giove must have been borrowed by one from the other at a post-Indo-European time—in particular, English borrowed it from an ancestor of Italian. (English does have a cognate for Giove; it is Tiw.)
-
- By the same token, no Indo-European sound that evolved into p in Welsh also evolved into p in Irish and Old Norse: Welsh p corresponds to Irish c and Old Norse hv. So a word that begins with p in all three of those languages, assuming it is an actual cognate and not just a chance resemblance, must have been borrowed from one by the other two at a post-Indo-European (and, in fact, post-Proto-Celtic) time. AJD 16:08, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- The reader may judge which is actually nonsense. The above, or the simple suggestion Puck's origins may lie on an even deeper language layer, before the Celtic and North Germanic language families split.
[edit] A Small Edit, noted
I just wanted to record a simple edit I made, fixing the grammar in the reference to the 'Berserk' series to fit proper tense (When referencing literature, whether continuing or not, one uses present tense unless said literature has a fixed point as historical literature or one is speaking from a specific timeframe reference within the literature) as well as to fix the spelling of 'allie' to the correct singular 'ally.' I'm still new to the editing thing so I apologize if I did this improperly (both the edit and the talk). I'll eventually make an account. I swear. 68.96.255.13 02:11, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Norwegian "Puk"
I cut the following text from the article as it seemed that someone had inserted a comment more suited to this discussion page (it was also randomly placed in the beginning of the "Puck in Literature" section for some reason). I don't know enough about Norwegian mythology to ascertain the truth of this statement, or even to make it make more sense(!), so have posted it here in the hope that someone else can look into it.
Puk is not the other Norwegian word for "Draug" it is called NØK or his name "NØKKEN" sounds similar, but is actually very different. He is a wather demon and that thing with the girls is true(according to the stories) but he is green with big eyes and has no links to shakespeares "Puck"
Missdipsy 22:04, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
- The information about the mythological nøkken is more or less true (he isn't necessarily green with big eyes, he appears in many forms, but everything else is true I think), but of course it has nothing to do in this article. 96T 20:56, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Merge?
- Don't merge. There's a brief Midsummer Night's Dream section here now, with the standard heading Main article: Puck (Shakespeare). There's been so much written about Shakespoeare's Puck, and the changes he effected in folklore of Puck, that should be represented in the Wikipedia article, that it would overweigh this one. It's a bare-bones stub as yet. It'll grow.--Wetman 06:56, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] The “Pocker” in Swedish is the Devil.
Um, no it's not. I took it away. //bnw
[edit] Not conducive to beginners?
Much of the start of this article assumes that the reader also has some basic knowledge of what a puck is. For instance, it makes references to Robin Goodfellow, which some readers may not understand. This should be addressed. Elfred (talk) 22:06, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
