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Sharlin | 2 days ago

Another Modern English cognate even closer to shyne than "sheen" is "shine" (and obviously the German "schein"). The words for "beautiful", "fair", "bright", "shining", "well-reputed", "righteous" have a long history of being related:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schinen#Middle_English (to shine, to appear)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skyr#Middle_English (clear-coloured, pale, light, luminous, radiant)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sciene#Old_English (beautiful, fair, brilliant, shining)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skīnaną (to shine, to appear)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skīriz (pure, clear, sheer)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skauniz (beautiful, shining)

and ultimately the PIE

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... *(s)ḱeh₁y- (to shine)

There are cognates absolutely everywhere in modern Germanic languages:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sk%C3%ADr#Icelandic skír (bright, clear, pure)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skir#Swedish (sheer, delicate, shining)

And even in Slavic languages:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s... *sijati (to shine, to illuminate)

Skauniz was even borrowed to Proto-Finnic and highly conserved in modern Finnish, Estonian, Ingrian, etc. which all have kaunis meaning "beautiful"!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/k... *kaunis

discuss

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schoen|2 days ago

I resemble that remark!

For a modern semantic parallel, we might point to the phrase "she's quite a looker".

It's also interesting to see the words related to hearing and reputation; I'm thinking of Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleos and Slavic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Ethnonym where there's a whole thing about having people talk about you loudly (or, alternatively, being able to produce intelligible speech at all).

thaumasiotes|2 days ago

> The words for "beautiful", "fair", "bright", "shining", "well-reputed", "righteous" have a long history of being related

Compare modern Mandarin 漂亮 ["beautiful", in most of the English senses of the word] and 亮 ["shine"].

Sharlin|1 day ago

Also, I just realized that Finnish loistava can mean either "excellent" or "shining", "radiant". Of course English also has, for instance, the phrase "shining example".

ChrisGreenHeur|2 days ago

One way to say it that is understandable in modern English and Swedish: She shines with beauty/ Hon skiner av skönhet

readthenotes1|2 days ago

This makes sense in the Firefly universe, too. Shiny!