Re: Prehistoric Ethnogenic Processes and Onomatopoeia

From: Marc Verhaegen
Message: 244
Date: 1999-11-12

In Dutch we don't have something like "to jump" AFAIK (though there is such a word in Frisian as another post said). We have the words "hoppen" (to hop), and "hobbelen" (to bump repeatedly), "hobbelig" (bumpy, rough (road)), "hobbel" (knob), "hobbelpaard" (rocking horse) etc. Van Dale's Etymologisch Woordenboek says "hoppen" & "huppen" cf. Greek "kubistan" (tumble) - perhaps not so ludicrous? --Marc
 
As for hoppian, I didn't say it can't be Proto-Germanic; I just said PIE *kub- would be ludicrous. *Hupp- sounds reasonably onomatopoeic to me. Still, projecting shared onomatopoeic roots onto the protolanguage is always a risky thing to do. English cuckoo corresponds to German Kuckuck, but in the common ancestor of English and German the word for 'cuckoo' was *gaukaz. In Modern Polish the bird is called kukułka, other Slavic languages have such words as kukučka, kukavica, kukavka, etc., but the reconstructible Proto-Slavic word for 'cuckoo' was something like *žegъza, whose reflexes survive only in dialects, but which has Baltic connections and looks like a reduplicated variant of the Germanic protoform. Of course we also have Latin cucūlus, but it's perhaps more surprising to learn that some languages have, or have had, non-onomatopoeic names for the cuckoo. Supposing (quite plausibly) that the PIEs had something like **ku'ku(:)-s (I'll double-star purely hypothetical forms), Grimm's and Verner's laws would have turned that into Old English **hugu, and that would have developed into ModE **how or the like; on the Slavic side we would get PSl **kъky > Polish **kiew or **kiekwa. Needless to say, nothing of the sort is attested. Onomatopoeic words often seem to violate the regular sound laws; if affected by them, they lose their sound-symbolic force and need "refreshing" (or rather replacement by new imitative words) from time to time.     Piotr