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Is it connected to корчить and короткий?

Vasmer does not answer.

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    Wiktionary traces крутить and короткий to different roots, it seems that корчить could potentially be related to короткий through palatalization of the stem's T - короче - корчить, and to me they appear closer semantically Aug 8, 2019 at 21:38

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Крутить is from the Proto-Slavic root *krǫt-, Old Church Slavonic крѫтити. In this word and in its cognates in other Indo-European languages, as Vasmer has it, we see the nasal element in the root. The Proto-Slavic nasal vowels developed from a combination vowel + nasal consonant when the Proto-Slavic law of the open syllables began to work and all the closed syllables got opened.

Корчить is from корчи 'spasms', which is from the Proto-Slavic *kr̩čь < PIE *(s)ker 'to turn (крутить), to bend (гнуть)', related to the Latin curvus 'bent, curved' (изогнутый) and Greek κυρτός (kyrtós) with the same meaning. Here we see no nasal element in the root, so the etymological connection of корчить and крутить is dubious, although semantically they are prety close. On the other hand, короткий (from the same PIE root *(s)ker) is related to корчить, but surely not to крутить.

The original nasal consonant in the root of крутить makes it unrelated to the other two words.

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  • I thought (s)ker- means cut (кора, скорлупа, short, scarce, скрести)
    – Anixx
    Aug 9, 2019 at 10:30
  • @Anixx - It looks like there were two hononymous IE roots *(s)ker, one with the meaning cut, and the other 'to turn': en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/… So if they are really two different, unrelated roots, and not just two very different meanings of the same root, then корчить and короткий are unrelated, too.
    – Yellow Sky
    Aug 9, 2019 at 10:57
  • also *ker- "horn/head"... but I am sure PIE had no homonymsous roots
    – Anixx
    Aug 9, 2019 at 14:13

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