Minecræft. (Minakraft?)

The biggest indie game of 2010: Minecraft. Since it shares half a compound noun with the title of this blog, that seems as good an excuse as any to look at the "etymology" of Minecraft.

First, in case you're unfamiliar with Minecraft, here's a video:

In terms of Minecraft's design inspiration, its creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, attributes its origins to Infiniminer, Dungeon Keeper, Left 4 Dead, and Dwarf Fortress (the last has been described as a mixture of Nethack, Oregon Trail, The Sims, and Lemmings).

Etymology 1: "the art of mining"
If Minecraft were truly parallel to stæfcræft, then it would be what is referred to in Sanskrit grammar as a tatpuruṣa (तत्पुरुष) compound , that is, a compound of the form YX, where X is the head noun and Y relates to X as if it were some non-nominative case form, e.g. a genitive, dative, etc. For example, the tatpuruṣa compound mousehunter is a hunter (=X) of mice (=Y). If this were the case then Minecraft would mean something like "the craft of mining", i.e. "the art of mining",---which in fact is an analysis which makes eminent sense, given that mining is a major component of the game.


Etymology 2: "mining and crafting"
Another possibility, however, is that Minecraft is what is referred to in Sanskrit grammar as a dvandva (Sanskrit द्वन्द्व dvandva 'pair') compound, that is a compound of the form YX, where X and Y could be otherwise expressed as X and Y. For example, the dvandva compound producer-director (duo) is someone who is a producer and a director a pair of people, one of whom is a producer, and one a director [examples: (1), (2), (3), (4)]. This would also seem a plausible analysis, given that aside from mining, crafting items is the other major component of the game (well, alongside trying not to get eaten by zombies or blown up by creepers).


An excursus on mine and craft
A third possibility, which presents itself in view of the fact that the game's creator, Persson, is Swedish, is that it is indeed a tatpuruṣa compound, but a Swedish compound rather than an English one. To explore this possibility, it's worthwhile to delve deeper into the etymologies of mine and craft.

Mine, in English, derives from an Anglo-Norman word mine, which was more or less a form of Old French (the word mine is found c1220 in Old French with sense 'underground cavity or excavation where metals and minerals are found'). The Old French/Anglo-Norman word itself was most likely borrowed from some continental Celtic language (compare Welsh mwyn 'mineral, mine' (14th cent.); Old Irish méin 'ore, metal'; Scottish Gaelic mèinn 'ore, mine'; further etymology of the Celtic words is uncertain). A Swedish cognate, mina, is attested from the 17th century; cognate forms appear in other Scandinavian and Germanic languages, as well as in other Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), but all appear to ultimately be borrowings from the French. The Scandinavian words are likely to have been borrowed from German Mine (itself, of course, also originally borrowed from the French word).

Craft is an interesting word. Like mine its ultimate ancestry is uncertain (i.e. there is no obvious reconstructable Proto-Indo-European source for either mine or craft), it appears only in Germanic, with no apparent cognates in other Indo-European languages. The origin sense of craft is "power, might, strength". This was one of the prevalent senses of craft in early English (the last attestation in the Oxford English Dictionary for this sense is from 1526, W. Bonde Pylgrimage of Perfection ii. sig. Kviii, "By the craft [=power] of nature."), and this is in fact the only sense borne by its cognates in other Germanic languages.

Etymology 3 ("the Swedish etymology"): "the power of the mine"
The development into the more familiar English senses of craft, e.g. "skill, art" is a solely English development---though it took place very early in English, as evidenced by an abundance of words in Old English of the type stæfcræft ("skill of letters; grammar"). This development seems to have involved a metaphorical extension of craft's original sense "(physical) power" as "intellectual power" and therefore "ability, skill, art". Thus, its Swedish cognate, kraft, has only the more original sense "power, might, strength". Therefore, if Minecraft were to be actually be a Swedish coinage (or, at least, an anglicisation of such a compound, which, I think, would have been Minakraft), then it could be treating as a (tatpuruṣa) compound meaning something like "power of the mine".


The real etymology
However, none of these proposed etymologies appear to in fact be correct. Persson on his blog (14 May 2009) originally proposed to call the game "Minecraft: Order of the Stone", a name "awesome but insane people in #tigirc helped [him] come up". Further investigation reveals that "[it was] RinkuHero...who suggested "Minecraft" (as an analogy to "Starcraft"), having not played the game and knowing nothing about it other than that it was a type of strategy game involving mines."

So Minecraft is simply an analogical form based on Starcraft (Starcraft is a game having to do with stars, and therefore a game having to do with mines is Minecraft). Now, Starcraft itself appears to be analogical form based on the title of one of Blizzard Entertainment's other games(/game franchises): Warcraft. If the compound type (tatpuruṣa) is carried over in the analogical process, then, in a sense, Minecraft should indeed mean something like "art of mining", which was the first of the proposed etymologies.


Miscellany: wars and crafts
The word warcraft itself is of course not a new coinage specific to the Blizzard Entertainment series. Interestingly though, warcraft does appear to be a relatively recent coinage (recent compared to the history of English at least), with the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation being from around 1660 (T. Fuller Worthies (1662) Lanc. 124 "Duke Hambleton‥had Officers who did Ken the War-craft, as well as any of our Age."). Though warcraft itself appears relatively late in the history of English, there are earlier formations ending in -craft which bear the same meaning that appear in Old English, including beaducræft(ig), gūðcræft, and wīgcræft (the last is the most widespread; the first two occur only in Beowulf).

Incidentally, war is a word with a weird history, it's a "returnee"-type borrowed word: it derives from a Germanic word, borrowed into French, and thence "given back" to English (a Germanic language). [It appears in late Old English (c1050) in the form wyrre, werre, a word borrowed from North-eastern Old French werre (cp. modern French descendant, guerre "war") which itself was borrowed from Old High German werra "confusion, discord, strife", related to the Old High German verb werran "to bring into confusion or discord" (cp. modern German wirren "to confuse, perplex"), ultimately from a Proto-Germanic root *werz-, *wers-, which is the origin also of the modern English word worse.] 

Anglo-Saxon Minecraft
Returning to Minecraft: what---you didn't ask---would be the Old English form of Minecraft, given that we have determined that it must mean "art/skill of mining"? Probably Delfingcræft.

Thus, on that note, we close with some gratuitous screenshots of Heorot, the famous meadhall of Beowulf, as constructed in Minecraft:

Trocheeotomy? Trocheeectomy.

The latest xkcd:


Click for larger image

Trocheeotomy? Or should it be trochee-ectomy? (~trocheeectomy)

[Some additional things:

Here's an interesting chart of trochee bigrams from the xkcd blag:

[again, click for larger image]

And Mark Liberman on Language Log offers some discussion here. (I imagine xkcd is thinking of Snow Crash rather than The Big U. By the bye, the linguistic-y part of Snow Crash I've always felt to be the weakest part of the book.) ]

The alt-text:

Good-bye, Good Luck, and Godspeed: On linguistic (de)secularisation

Godspeed
What exactly does someone mean if they wish you Godspeed? Here's one answer, courtesy of comedian Eddie Izzard:

Source: Eddie Izzard, Circle (2000)

In fact, the speed of Godspeed refers to one of speed's other early senses, namely "success" or "(good) luck, fortune, prosperity". The OED's [1] earliest citation for Godspeed is from Tyndale's Bible translation:

[1526] Bible (Tyndale) - 2 John 10   Yf ther come eny vnto you and bringe not this learninge him receave not to housse: neither bid him God spede.
(Roughly: "If anyone comes to you who does not bring this (Christian) learning, don't let him into your house, nor wish him Godspeed.")

In such early uses of Godspeed, it appears that spede is used as a subjunctive verbal form, so that God spede means something like "may God speed (you)", i.e. "may God grant you success/prosperity".

[1597] Shakespeare Richard II i. iv. 31   A brace of draimen bid, God speed him wel.

More familiar is the use of Godspeed as a noun-noun compound, as in:

[1865] J. R. Lowell Polit. Ess. (1888) 229   Every humane and generous heart‥has wished us God-speed.

However, I have reason to suspect that examples like those from Tyndale and Shakespeare represent a later refashioning: in Old English, the verb spēdan does not seemed to have been used a causative (nor does there appear to be any other causative form of it), while the 16th century examples treat it as such (i.e. X speed Y as "may X cause Y to be speedy/to succeed"). 

Rather Old English spēdan meant simply "to speed, to be successful, to have good fortune", in which case, the later Middle/Modern English God spede should have meant something like "may God be successful" (or "may God go really fast"?!). The equivalent of "God causing someone to be successful"  in Old English required a periphrasis of the sort "God gave speed (i.e. success) to someone", as in:

Exodus 153b-4b: þær him mihtig god on ðam spildsiðe spede forgefe
("if Mighty God would grant them success on the destructive quest")

I argue that the origin of Godspeed is in fact as a compound word, formed of good+speed, which was later reanalysed as God+speed, whence back-formations like God spede (ye), with spede being reanalysed as a causative (i.e. "may (he) cause you to be successful").

Before turning to details of the analysis proper, a quick lesson on some Middle and early Modern English sound changes.

First, the Great English Vowel Shift. I won't go into all of the details here, for they don't concern us, but in general the Great English Vowel Shift raised all long vowels (and diphthongised /ī/ to /aɪ̯/ and /ū/ to /aʊ̯/). More relevantly, Old English gōd "good" (noun and adjective) became /gūd/. By other sound changes, Old English gŏd "god" (originally a neuter noun, but a masculine form was innovated in Christian contexts) became /gɔd/, which by later changes became /gɒd/ (British) or /gɑd/ (American). There were yet later changes affecting ū which caused various (and somewhat sporadic) shortenings, sometimes to /ʌ/ (e.g. blood /blʌd/ from OE blōd) and sometimes to /ʊ/, as in the case of good /gʊd/.

Additionally, in Middle English a phonological change occurred which shortened long vowels in closed syllables which preceded another syllable. For example, consider the changes which occurred in vowel of the first member of the compound words shepherd and wisdom, contrasted with the lack of change in the simplex words sheep and wise, as summarised in the Table below.

Old English	Middle English
scēap	sheep [shēp]
scēaphirde	shĕpherd
wīs	wīs
wīsdom	wĭsdom

Here the simplex words wise and sheep thus remained unaffected (and became, by the Great English Vowel Shift, /waɪ̯s/ and /ʃīp/, respectively), but the vowels of first component in shepherd ("sheep-herd(er)") and wisdom were shortened.

With these sound changes in mind, let us consider what would have happened to a hypothetical Old English compound *gōd-spēd ("good fortune, good luck"): by the Middle English closed-syllable-before-another-syllable rule, this would become /godspēd/, which would thus have become Modern English Godspeed: /gɒdspīd/ (British), /gɑdspīd/ (American). 

If this etymology is correct, then the original sense of Godspeed is good speed, in other words good luck---which makes eminent sense as a formula of well-wishing (note above in the above video clip, Izzard in fact glosses "good luck" as "Godspeed").

 In fact, an Old English form gōd-spēd is not entirely hypothetical: the adjectival form gōdspēdig is recorded in the verse "translation" of Genesis A:

Genesis A 1008b-9b: Him þa brego engla, godspedig gast geanþingade, "Hwæt...'

("The Lord of Angels (i.e. God), the "good-speedy" spirit, answered him: 'Listen...'")

[This is God addressing Cain, right after Cain utters his signature "I am not my brother's keeper" line.]

The question is how to translate godspedig (though, as is typical of Old English manuscripts, the vowel quantity is not indicated, it is fairly obvious that it is in fact gōdspēdig and not gŏdspēdig, given that it characterises God himself). If it is an adjectivalised noun-noun compound (as Bosworth and Toller treat it in their dictionary [2]), then perhaps "rich in good(ness)". But it could be based on an adjective-noun compound  gōdsped "good fortune", and thus mean something like "one is good at success, full of good fortune". 

In any case the occurrence of gōdspēdig in Old English strengthens the case for Godspeed as originating from gōdspēd "good luck" with god spēde "may God speed/grant good fortune to (you)" being a later reinterpretation (with reanalysis of spēde as causative).

Gospel

Another word which has a similar history is gospel. The original form in Old English was gōdspel "good news", glossing Latin ēvangelium, (from Greek ευαγγελιον (evangelion), from eu- "good" and angelion "message"; but which in classical Greek meant only "a reward for bringing good news," and in the plural "a sacrifice offered on receiving good news"). Now, by the Middle English shortening rule described above, gōdspel would have become gŏdspel, and thus Modern English gospel /gɒspɛl/  (ignoring the loss of the d).

However, in this case, the word was in fact actually reanalysed much earlier, at some point in Old English, as gŏdspel "news about God", apparently based on the written form (which would not have usually indicated vowel quantity), as evidenced by the forms in other Germanic language (the other Germanic peoples were evangelised by Anglo-Saxons): Old Saxon godspell, Old High German gotspell, Old Norse guð-, goðspiall.

Good-bye
Assuming the above proposed etymology for Godspeed is correct: that the original was good speed "good luck" and thus secular in nature, it is interesting to note that exactly the opposite change occurred in the case of Good-bye: an originally religious formula was secularised. Good-bye is a shortening of God be with you(/ye). Here God has been substituted by Good, presumably by analogy with/contamination by other leave-taking formulae like Good Day, Good Night, Good Morning etc.

Summary
Godspeed likely originated as a secular formula "good speed" (i.e. "good luck"), but due to a phonological change in Middle English affecting long vowels in close syllables followed by one or more syllables the vowel of the first word was shorten, becoming homophonous with God, thus giving rise to a reinterpretation of spede as a causative verb meaning "cause to succeed" and resulting in formations like God spede "God prosper (you)". While Good-bye originally had religious connotations, being a shortened form of "God be with you/ye", but by analogy to other leave-taking formula like Good Night, God was substituted by Good. 

One secular formula, go(o)d-speed, was thus reinterpreted as religious in nature, and the other, originally religious formula, go(o)d-bye, took on a secular nature.  

[Updates (04-Feb-2011):

Some new information gleaned from the comments at languagehat's blog:

I. MMcM points out that:
(1) Webster (ca. 1830) glosses godspeed as "good speed" [link to Google Books page here].
(2) Tyndale's Bible translation (whence the first citation of godspeed, see above), also includes good speed [link to Google Books page here]: "LORde God of my maſter Abrahã, ſend me good ſpede this daye, & ſhewe mercy vnto my maſter Abraham".

II. Goodspeed also appears as a surname, e.g. Ben Zimmer's maternal line [hattip Ben Zimmer], the author of the 1923 American Translation of the New Testament, Edgar J. Goodspeed [hattip John Cowan].

]

References:
[1]The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.

[2]Bosworth, Joseph and T. Northcote Toller. 1898. An Anglo-Saxon dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.

On analogy: Octopuses, Octopi, Octopodes, Emacsen

From a post on boingboing.net, Merriam Webster editor Kory Stamper discusses the "correct" plural of octopus:

Octopus:octopi is a standard example illustrating ("false") analogy that I've used in class before. The story I've told goes like this: Octopus sounds like a Latin word, and so by analogy to Latin borrowings like syllabus:syllabi, alumnus:alumni, people often form its plural as octopi. But, so the standard story goes, it's not a borrowing from Latin, but rather from Greek, so octopi is technically incorrect. The proper Greek plural is rather octopodes.

[More technically, it is a borrowing from Latin, but the Latin word itself is a borrowing/coinage from Greek, and the Greek word would be (in nominative singular) ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), whose (nominative) plural would be ὀκτώποδες (oktṓpodes). Given that it's a scientific name, it will in fact be a Latin word (albeit one of Greek origins). By modern Latin rules for Greek borrowings, it should be a third declension noun, and form its plural with -es. Thus the Latin forms are octopus:octopodes.]

In the video, however, Stamper makes the following arguments: (1) octopodes sounds rather pedantic (I think a good compromise here though is to pronounce it to rhyme with nodes), and (2) once a word is borrowed into English, it becomes an English word and so should form its plural according to the standard English rules for pluralisation, i.e. it should be octopuses.

In fact, though it is true that -s is the dominant plural ending in English, and thus the one usually used for borrowings and new coinages, it is not the only possibility. Even coinages don't always form plural with -s. For example, there is a powerful text-editing program called Emacs. Different varieties of this program have arisen, and thus a plural form is sometimes called for. And the standard plural used is Emacsen (by analogy to ox:oxen; cf. boxen and VAXen). The point being simply that  if even coinages don't always use the -s plural, then we needn't expect that borrowings should either. And therefore, nothing forces us to accept octopuses as the "correct" plural. [Caveat: of course there is no real "correct" plural for any word, aside from whatever people accept/use.]

But, as it stands, it would seem that the "correct" pluralshould be either octopuses, since that conforms to the dominant pluralisation rule for English, or else octopodes, since octopus is a coinage made from Greek components.

As one of the commenters to the boingboing post (Anon #80) points out though, there is in fact a case to be made for octopi as the "historically correct plural". The case is as follows: Linnaeus may have coined octopus ("eight foot (creature)") by analogy to the old Latin word for "octopus", namely polypus ("many foot (creature)"). Now polypus is obviously also a borrowing from Greek, but in Latin the normal plural of polypus was in fact polypi! (And, likewise, the plural of the modern scientific term polypus is also polypi). 

[The commenter goes on to add that even the Greeks sometimes treated πολύπους (polúpous) as a second declension noun (which would give it a nominative plural of πολύποι (polúpoi). So even the Romans might have had a precedent for their -i plural of polypus.]

So if octopus is seen as a modern "updating" of the original Latin word for "octopus" (polypus), then there is an interesting case to be made for octopi as the (historically) "correct" plural.

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From languagehat.

Philology and (La)Tex: on Proto-Indo-European dragon-slaying and Hittite ḫ

A couple of years ago I made the switch from Word to LaTex. At the time I was in the middle of writing a paper on formulaic language in Proto-Indo-European, specifically working on the reconstruction of formulae connected with the PIE dragon-slaying mytheme. Though the (first draft of the) paper was mostly written, I decided I would reset it in LaTeX. This was a rather labourious task, but resulted in much more aesthetically-pleasing document, and LaTeX allows for a much easier system of referring to numbered examples than does Word (amongst other benefits of the LaTeX type-setting system). [I use Wolfgang Sternefeld's linguex package for example numbering.]

As this was a philological paper dealing with a number of different languages (Old Irish, Old English, Old Saxon, Gothic, Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Avestan, Pahlavi, and Hittite), special diacritics and characters were required. Rei Fukui's TIPA package handles almost all of the characters/diacritics which were needed. The one exception was the Hittite "laryngeal ḫ" and polytonic classical Greek.

I. How to typeset Hittite ḫ in LaTeX:

The character ḫ may be defined by the following macro (assuming that the TIPA package has been loaded in the preamble by \usepackage{tipa}):

\newcommand{\hith}{\tipaLoweraccent[+.1ex]{\u{}}{h}}

Then whenever ḫ is required, it may be called via the command {\hith}, as in the following text:

n=an=za namma \super{\sc{mu\v{s}}} illuyanka$[$n$]$ tara{\hith}{\hith}\={u}wan d\=ai\v{s}

which results in:

n=an=za namma ^MUŠilluyanka[n] taraḫḫūwan dāiš

(meaning "He (the storm god) began to overcome the serpent"; from KBo. 3.7 iii 24-5)

II. How to typeset classical Greek in LaTeX:

In the philological tradition, the only language using a non-Latinate script which is not transliterated is Greek (I've always found this a bit unfair: why isn't Sanskrit rendered in Devanagari?). To typeset polytonic (ancient) Greek in LaTeX, we'll need the following packages: babel, teubner, fontenc, cbgreek. Defining a macro \greekfont then allows us to switch to polytonic Greek.

A minimal example illustrating the usage:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[polutonikogreek,latin,english]{babel}
\usepackage{mathptmx} %OPTIONAL, in order to set Latin/English in Times font
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{teubner}
\usepackage{tipa} %OPTIONAL, for typesetting diacritics/special characters for other lgs.


\newcommand{\greekfont}[1]{\fontencoding{LGR}\fontfamily{cmr}\selectfont\foreignlanguage{greek}{#1}\normalfont}


\begin{document}
{\noindent}From Pindar's \textit{Olympian} 13.63--4:
{\noindent}\greekfont{\Ar{o}c t\cap{a}c \s{o}fi\'hdeos u\r{i}\'on pote Gorg\'onos \cap{\s{h}} p\'oll> \s{a}mf\`i krouno\cap{i}c\\P\'agason ze\cap{u}xai poj\'ewn \Gs{e}pajen}
\end{document}

produces:

(meaning "who (rel. pro.) beside the Springs, striving to break the serpent Gorgon's child, Pegasos, endured much hardship")

You'll need to make sure you have the full cbgreek package, otherwise the Greek font will be blurry and ugly.

III. Post scriptum
Here's the rub (of course): having produced a beautifully typeset document, I submitted it to Historische Sprachforschung (Adalbert Kuhn's old Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung). It was accepted, but the journal could only process Word documents. So I had to go back and retypeset the whole thing in Word (again). This involved a lot of using find-and-replace (to turn LaTeX code/macros into Unicode characters or Word formatting or example numbers etc.) Unfortunately, this almost meant that the table I had managed to fit on a single page (in order that the various formulae could be easily compared) using smaller font sizes and rotating it horizontally using the package lscape, thus

is in HS split across three pages...

Happily, the original LaTeX-produced version did in fact appear earlier in Studies in the Linguistic Sciencies: Illinois Working Papers 2009 (who do accept LaTeX submissions (since I designed a LaTeX style file for the journal...)).

References:

[1] Slade, Benjamin. 2008[2010]. How (exactly) to slay a dragon in Indo-European? PIE *bheid- {h₃ég^whim, k^wŕ̥mi-}. Historische Sprachforschung 121: 3-53. [link]

[2] Slade, Benjamin. 2009. Split serpents and bitter blades: Reconstructing details of the PIE dragon-combat. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers 2009: 1-57. [link]

English "like" can, like, function like Sanskrit "इति"

In a recent blog post, "How Old is Parasite 'Like'?", Oxford Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explores the history of (modern) English like when used as a type of filler/discourse-marker. However, modern English like has another function, which I think is often conflated with filler like (presumably because it commonly occurs in the speech of people who also use filler like): namely, as a sort of quotative marker (also noted by commenters Mike Gibson and Charles Wells).

She was like OMG! And then I was like wow!

The above sentences might be "translated" as:

She said, "Oh my god!" And then I said, "Wow!"

Or (since there seems to be some ambiguity):

She said, "Oh my god!" And then I thought, "Wow!"

This use as a sort of quotation mark is a separate function from its pragmatic discourse-marking use (which Liberman focusses on) in examples like:

You wanna, like, go see a movie?

Which might be uttered by a teenage boy asking a girl out on a date , where like can either act as a "hedge", foreseeing the possibility of rejection ("....it's ok if you don't want to"), or to allow for the possibility of other activities ("...or get some ice cream").

Both uses of like are stigmatised; again, the stigmatisation of "quotative" like is probably via guilt-by-association with the discourse-marking/filler like. I'll admit that, like Liberman, I find both uses rather aesthetically displeasing (which doesn't mean that I never use them---they are, as Liberman suggests, somewhat viral). But the "quotative" like is interesting. Though Liberman remarks that:

Particularly disconcerting is the fact that the analogs of like swamped other languages at roughly the same time or a few decades later. Germans have begun to say quasi in every sentence. Swedes say liksom, and Russians say kak by; both mean “as though.” In this function quasi, liksom, and kak by are recent. The influence of American like is out of the question, especially in Russian. So why, and why now? Delving into the depths of Indo-European and Proto-Germanic requires courage and perspicuity. But here we are facing a phenomenon of no great antiquity and are as puzzled as though we were trying to decipher a cuneiform inscription.

Interestingly, however, the "quotative" function of English like has a couple of parallels in Sanskrit. One is these---the one most closely resembling English "quotative" like, at least in its frequency---is the Sanskrit particle iti (इति).

Both Sanskrit iti and English like can occur in the following contexts:

A. When quoting words actually utttered, alongside a verb of speaking:
(Skt-1) kathitam avalokitayā "madanodyānam gato mādhava" iti
"Avalokita had told me that Madhava was gone to the grove of Kama." [Mālatīmādhava I, p. 11; cited from Speijer[1]:§493a]

(Eng-1) "She said like 'I want to go too'."

B. Expressing the contents of one's thought:
(Skt-2) manyate pāpakam kṛtvā "na kaścid vetti mām" iti
"After committing some sins, one thinks 'nobody knows me'." [Mahabharata 1.74.29; cited from Speijer[1]:§493b]

(Eng-2) “And I thought like 'wow, this is for me'.” [OED, 2nd Supplement[2]; 1970, no earlier citations]

C. More general setting forth of motives, emotions, judgements etc.:
(Skt-3) vyāghro mānuṣam khādati iti lokāpavādaḥ
"'The tiger eats the man' is slanderous gossip." [Hitopadesha 10; cited from Speijer[1]:§493c]

(Eng-3) "I was like 'wow'!"

There are obvious differences between English quotative like and Sanskrit iti, including the fact that English quotative like precedes the "quotation", while Sanskrit iti follows it (in conformity with the general left-branching nature of Sanskrit syntax).

Further, Sanskrit iti doesn't have any of the other functions or meanings associated with English like. English like derives ultimately from Proto-Germanic *lîko- "body, form, appearance", while Sanskrit iti is built from the pronominal stem i-. In fact, iti still has pronominal uses, even in Classical Sanskrit, as in the following example.

(Skt-4) tebhyas pratijnāya nalaḥ kariṣya iti
"Nala promised them he would do thus." [Nala 3,1; cited from Speijer[1]:§492]

Amusingly, I find that (pretending that a parallel development has taken place in English) replacing "quotative" like with thus actually seems grammatical to me---though wholly unidiomatic, e.g.:

(Eng-4) "I was thus: 'Wow!'"

(Somehow I imagine that if thus had been recruited as a quotative in English rather than like, the use of a quotative marker wouldn't be so stigmatised, since there would be no association with filler like and, moreover, thus is largely used in formal registers of English.)

However, there is another element in Sanskrit which---though not as frequently used in this function as iti---actually is more similar to English quotative like in its syntax and semantics: yathā. Yathā is, properly speaking, a relative pronoun and is often part of relative-correlative constructions of the form yathā X...tathā Y "As X...., so Y". However, it can occur without correlative tathā, and in fact can have the meaning "like", as in the following example:

(Skt-5) mansyante mām yathā nṛpam
"They will consider me like a king." [Mahabharata 4.2.5; cited from Speijer[1]:§470a]

Yathā can also function as a sort of quotative, but---unlike iti and like like---it precedes rather than follows the quoted discourse:

(Skt-6) viditam eva yathā "vayam malayaketau kimcitkālāntaram uṣitāḥ".
"It is certainly known (to you) that I stayed for some time with Malayaketu." [Mudrarakshasa VII; cited from Speijer[1]:§494]
(Or, maybe: "You certainly know, like, 'I stayed for some time with Malayaketu'.")

(Yathā and iti (since they occupy different syntactic positions) can also co-occur.)

So there is at least one antique parallel for the development of modern English like as a quotative marker.

Returning to the more commonly used iti, the following Sanskrit example---occurring when one of the heroes of the Mahabharata has performed an act of generosity so great that even the gods are impressed---I think is a great parallel for examples like "I was like, 'Wow!'":

(Skt-7) tato 'ntarikṣe vāg āsīt "sādhu sādhv" iti
"Then a voice in the sky was like 'Wow! Wow!'" [Mahabharata 14.91.15]

This line might be more usually translated as "then a voice in the sky said 'Bravo! Bravo!'", but there is actually no verb of speaking: āsīt means "was".

References:
[1] Speijer, J.S. 1886. Sanskrit syntax. Leiden: E.J. Brill. [reprinted, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1973.]
[2] The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.