Re: [tied] Hermunduri as Border Merchants

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 13678
Date: 2002-05-09

A linguist's hint (suspending my scepticism just a little :)). If *-dura- in Germanic has anything to do with doors or gates, it must be an indigenous word (not excluding the possibility of a calque, of course). The IE root noun *dHwor-/*dHur- was moved to less archaic declensions in the individual Germanic languages, everywhere with the generalised weak form of the root, *dur-, yielding _all_ the reflexes you quote. In Gothic we have the regular lowering of *u before /r/, giving /o/ spelt <au>, in a weak feminine version of the word *dur-o:n-, in OE we have a secondary feminine u-stem <duru> (*dur-u-) beside the neuter <dor> from *dur-a-, with the predictable lowering of the *u before the *a of the second syllable, ON dyrr, OS duri and similar forms in German and Dutch reflect the old athematic plural *dur-iz, etc., etc., etc. In older Germanic /u/ and short /o/ developed from positional variants of the same PGmc. phoneme.
 
Suffice it to say that the forms are unproblematic, since well-known morphological and phonological processes in Germanic account for their derivation from *dur- quite satisfactorily. As regards its form, *-duraz would correspond _exactly_ (as a cognate, not as a loan) to Greek <-thuros> in compounds. It can't be an occupational term, though: not "porters" or "gatekeepers" but "having such and such gates" (as in Gk. ditHuros, Lat. biforis ~ biforus 'having two doors' or athuros 'having no gate, open'), depending on how we interpret the first part of the compound (if you want a loan from Greek, <hermo:n> won't do, since the first part of <X-tHuros> must be the composition form of a stem, not an inflected word).
 
Now, a fresh thought: what about those 540 doors of Valhalla in the Norse tradition? (if I remember aright, 800 men could march in abreast through each of them). Weren't they ermen?
 
Piotr
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: x99lynx@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2002 8:18 PM
Subject: [tied] Hermunduri as Border Merchants

As far as, matching the vowel with the apparent Germanic -u- in Hermunduri
and Hermondoroi, all I have is that in Gothic we have attested <daur>, in ON,
<dyr>, OHG <tor>, and according to OED, OE had <dor>, <dure>, <dor> and
<dure>, suggesting multiple sources- all meaning gate or door.  I see no
reason to think that the idea of a closed or open door or gate meaning ACCESS
or lack of it did not exist in any Germanic mind.  It clearly did in Latin
(e.g., <dithurus> a seat in the Roman tribunal.)