Re: Oesysla/Eysysla etc.

From: tgpedersen@...
Message: 5971
Date: 2001-02-08

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
[snip]
>
> But they can scarcely be much earlier than that. They are
transparent Old Norse formations, displaying uniquely North Germanic
phonetic developments and containing the element -sýsla found at that
time throughout North Germanic. It is derived from a native verb
root, so it can't be an exotic import. However, since it doesn't
occur (as far as I know) anywhere in North Sea Germanic, High German
or Gothic, it doesn't seem reasonable to date its origin before the
Ingveonic/Scandinavian split.

Let me see if I understand you correctly.
We have an unattested language *A, from which are descended languages
B1, B2, and B3. A certain root occurs in B1, but not in B2 and B3.
Therefore it did not occur in *A. Is this what you mean?
>
> Finally, if the names Eysysla and Adalsysla had been coined several
centuries before AD 800, their original form would have been very
different (e.g. with common Germanic *auja- for East Scandinavian ö
or West Scandinavian öy/ey). One would expect such archaic forms to
survive somewhere among the Baltic Finnic speakers (e.g. *auja- >
*aiva- like *flauja- > Finnish laiva 'ship'), but I'm not aware of
any such traces.
The Finnic speaker have not borrowed a Germanic term for island? Is
that the problem?

>Actually Ey-sysla is a mere semantic calque: Saare-maa means
literally 'island-land' --
"Sysla" semantically calques "maa" 'land'? I thought we were dicussing
why the term "sysla" was used?

a name more logical from the point of view of the Finnic natives, for
whom it has always been "The Island".
Really? And what was Hiamaa then to them?

>Adal-sysla may also translate a parallel native term.
And then, it may not.
>
> The linguistic chronology matches very well the East Baltic
>expansion of the Swear, hence my suspicion that they were the namers.
Unless the word "Øsel" was borrowed into Plattdeutsch from Danish at
the time the Hanse broke through to the Baltic
>
Torsten

> Piotr
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 10:45 AM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Language - Area - Routes
>
>
> I know the island was Danish later on. Estonia was also Danish in
the
> 13th and 14th century, in case you shold want to raise that point
> later. But one might wonder: why use the name of an adminstrative
> division which at that time within Denmark was used only in
Jutland,
> when the state of Denmark by then was based on Sjælland and Scania?
> "The name doesn't go back..." Absence of proof... etc