Saudi Arabia Foreign Exchange Reserves -- Posted Overnight -- February 2020 Data

Link here.

I'm already eagerly looking forward to data for March, April, May.

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The Book Page

Ninety percent of my waking hours is taking are of Sophia, and we have accomplished a lot things these past two weeks. But when I get a couple of free hours in the evening, this is what I've been reading / working on for the past two weeks:

• re-reading the Annotated Wuthering Heights (notes here);
• evolution, specifically, amphibians, more specifically, frogs; and,
• the Celts, specifically the discovery of "middle earth"

I've got three books out -- and they are really, really good books -- regarding evolution, but interestingly, they don't spend much time on etymology. So, it's back to wiki.

I find this incredibly interesting, again, frogs:

The origins of the word frog are uncertain and debated.

The word is first attested in Old English as frogga, but the usual Old English word for the frog was frosc (with variants such as frox and forsc), and it is agreed that the word frog is somehow related to this.

Old English frosc remained in dialectal use in English as frosh and frosk into the nineteenth century, and is paralleled widely in other Germanic languages, with examples in the modern languages including German Frosch, Icelandic froskur, and Dutch (kik)vors.

These words allow us to reconstruct a Common Germanic ancestor *froskaz."

The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary finds that the etymology of *froskaz is uncertain, but agrees with arguments that it could plausibly derive from a Proto-Indo-European base along the lines of *preu = "jump".

How Old English frosc gave rise to frogga is, however, uncertain, as the development does not involve a regular sound-change. Instead, it seems that there was a trend in Old English to coin nicknames for animals ending in -g, with examples—themselves all of uncertain etymology—including dog, hog, pig, stag, and (ear)wig. Frog appears to have been adapted from frosc as part of this trend.

So, now, a new game with Sophia. Name animals with names that end in "g."

Interestingly, the first true frog: Triadobatrachus .... something.

For the life of me, I can't find the etymology of this word except for this "three-frogged." "Tri" = three and adobatrachus  or obatrachus "means" frog, but I don't know the Latin/Greek for adobatrachus. Maybe it's in the wiki entry but I missed it. I thought trachus might have something to do with trachea and maybe it does, but every time I do a wiki search for "trachus" it takes me to "tragus" (part of the ear). Adobo is a form of cooking so that's no help, unless they're talking about froglegs. LOL.

Sometimes when you study evolution, like everything else, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. Take amphibians. Evolutionary-wise, fifteen minutes of fame. Not much came of them: salamanders and frogs, that's about it. But yet, the amphibian "concester" (a Richard Dawkins term) was the first tetrapod and all tetrapods on earth can trace their heritage back to that amphibian-like animal.

If one is interested in this sort of stuff, this is a nice two-page summary (https://www.pnas.org/content/109/15/5557) but when that pops up, you may want to download the pdf: so much easier to read.

By the way, "di" is derived from the Greek (split; dilemma, diverge, Dimetrodon) but "bi" is derived from the Latin. When deciding whether to use "di" or "bi" as the prefix, the general rule is that "bi" goes with words derived from Latin, and "di" goes with words derived from Greek. I mentioned that to Arianna -- the oldest granddaughter -- she said she already knew that.

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βάτραχος

Update, April 5, 2020:

Interestingly, the first true frog: Triadobatrachus .... something.

For the life of me, I can't find the etymology of this word except for this "three-frogged." "Tri" = three and adobatrachus  or obatrachus "means" frog, but I don't know the Latin/Greek for adobatrachus. Maybe it's in the wiki entry but I missed it. I thought trachus might have something to do with trachea and maybe it does, but every time I do a wiki search for "trachus" it takes me to "tragus" (part of the ear). Adobo is a form of cooking so that's no help, unless they're talking about froglegs. LOL.

Finally, I found the origin of batrachus. But it appears philologists haven't been able to do much better.

It appears that batrahus is borrowed from Pre-Greek or Semitic (think the plague of frogs).

Pre-Greek consists of the unknown language or languages spoken in prehistoric Greece before the settlement of Proto-Greek speakers during the Middle and Late Bronze Age period in the area. It is possible that Greek took over some thousand words and proper names from such a language (or languages), because some of its vocabulary cannot be satisfactorily explained as deriving from the Proto-Greek language (also known as Proto-Hellenic, an Indo-European language).

Pre-Greek is not Indo-European.

"Helen of Troy" and the fall of Troy marked the end of the Late Bronze Age, and the beginning of the Iron Age, around 1200 BC.

Back to βάτραχος, it is only said, "seemingly imitative of croaking." A stretch. So, unless there's an incredibly new finding, we will probably not learn any more about how batrachus came about.