Tbilisi - "the Warm Place"

[varpho]

hello,
i read once that the name of Georgian capital city Tbilisi [თბილისი] means "warm place" in Georgian.
i checked it with this German<->Georgian dictionary and indeed 'warm' is "tbili" [თბილი

Comments

[tacente]

+1, more or less.

[tacente]

That +1 was a percent, right?

No it wasn't; it was a sign of (cautious) agreement (meaning "I second your opinion"). I'm sorry, this type of newspeak is so widespread in the Russian segment of the Internet that I mistakenly thought it was universal.

Re the essence: there are, indeed, lots of chance resemblances between languages. Besides, guessing at the meaning of a city name more than a thousand years old is always risky. Nobody knows what "Moscow" means. If it's not a Roman city (except Rome, which is an enigma again), the name of any old place is indecipherable.

Москва

[varpho]

i learned that "Moscow", which is the name both for the city and for the river, comes from a Finno-Ugric language, but i do not know what was the original meaning of the word.

Re: Москва

[ex_co_lum_bu730]

This is the most popular hypothesis, since the city name is known to derive from the river Moskva, and there are hundreds of hydronims in Central Russia that end with "-va", which simply means "water" in Finno-Ugric. You know, the whole area was populated by Finno-Ugric tribes before the Slavic migration in the end of the first millenium.

Re: Москва

[varpho]

yes, i know. :)

Re: Москва

[six_crazy_guys]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merya_language

Traces of the language can be found in place names, such as the rivers Moskva < moska "litter, crud", and Volga < valk(ea) "white".

It's more than likely the city was named after the river.

Re: Москва

[varpho]

"littered water"? ;)

yes, hydronyms are usually the oldest toponyms.

Re: Москва

[ekeme_ndiba]

and Volga < valk(ea) "white".

Hmm, Volga also has much more simple Eastern Slavic explanation, Vologa (still used in Russian in its Southern Slavic form vlaga, moisture).

Of course, most hydronyms of present-day Russia have Finnic roots (but not always, cf. apparently Slavic name of Moksha river, which even became an ethnonym of a Finnic people).

P.S. Is it allowed to change tense within the parentheses? ;-)

[the_cowch]

Well, I can tell you it's not just a Russian habit. I've seen it used that way on several primarily English forums, but I don't think it's very common netspeak outside of forums.

Just like iawtc isn't commonly understood outside of LiveJournal.