Re: [tied] Danke - dzienkuje - any connection?

On 2006-04-11 20:43, george knysh wrote:

> ****GK: That's the Bruckner thesis (and others', incl.
> J.B. Rudnyckyj in his "Etymological Dictionary of the
> Ukr. language). I have some queries. (1)Why, if
> Ukrainian "djakuju" is from Polish "dzenkuje", is
> there a loss of the "z", esp. since Ukr. is not at all
> averse to the "dz" sound, either at the beginning or
> within words? The denazalization of Gmc "dank-" to
> "djak-" would be standard procedure.

It isn't a loss of /z/ (the <z> in Pol. dzie,kuje, [sic] is just
orthographic) but the substitution of Ukrainian palatalised /d'/ for the
Polish _affricate_ /dz'/, based on a regular correspondence pattern
between both languages (Pol. dz', ts' : Ukr. d', t' in
palatality-preserving contexts, e.g. Pol. dziad : Ukr. did; Pol.
cia,gna,c' : Ukr. tjahnuty).

(2) Any chance

> the Slavic word (at least in some Slavic languages) is
> a borrowing from the Gothic? All I've found is
> "th"agks/"th"anks for "thanks" in Gothic. Is this (or
> the Gothic equivalent of "to thank") not a possible
> source? Serbo-Croatian and Russian use different words
> of course.*****

This is out of the question. To begin with, the common Gmc. (and Gothic)
word had initial *þ- (= voiceless "th"), which would have been
substituted with Slavic *t. The characteristic development of the
initial voiceless fricative into /d/ betrays a German source. The front
vowel is due to umlaut in the German plural which occurred in the
original polite expression borrowed by the western Slavs: OHG denke
'thanks' --> Pol. dzie,ki (the sg. <dzie,k> and the verb <dzie,kowac'>
are secondary derivatives within Polish and the other Slavic languages
that have the word).

Piotr