From: tgpedersen
Message: 62345
Date: 2009-01-03
>The last element of the name of the Swedish landscape Medelpad is
> On 2008-12-30 21:33, dgkilday57 wrote:
>
> > One expects *pant- to be Grimm-shifted into *fanþ-, and
> > loss of the nasal in western WGmc would require compensation,
> > yielding *fa:þ-.
>
> There's no such thing at the WGmc. level. The loss of the nasal is
> restricted to the "North Sea" dialects, i.e. English, Frisian and
> Old Saxon, yielding *a~: (> Anglo-Frisian /o:/). In German, one
> would expect +<fand>. Pre-Gmc. *pant- is definitely a non-starter.
>
> > To me it makes more sense to assume a Gaulish *bat- as the source.
> > Pokorny assigns some Insular Celtic words pertaining to death, Old
> > Irish <baîd> 'dies', etc., to PIE *gwa:- (i.e. *gweH2-) 'to go,
> > come' on the grounds that dying is a going forward from the realm
> > of mortals. In English, <pass> is used in a similar sense. This
> > Insular specialization of the word was not necessarily shared with
> > Gaulish. The Greek adjective <batós> '(easily) passed, passable',
> > if it comes from *gwm.to- like the Latin participle <ventum>,
> > would have *banto- as the expected Gaulish cognate. However, a
> > parallel adjective *gwH2to- from *gweH2- not *gwem- would yield
> > Gaul. *bato-. I propose that this form in the sense 'passable'
> > was used in Gaulish, typically as a substantive with a noun 'way,
> > road' understood, and borrowed as a noun by pre-Grimm-shift
> > Germanic-speakers along the lower Rhine, where it regularly
> > became WGmc *paþa-, and remained restricted to regional usage.
>
> Interesting, and quite plausible. BTW, Matasovic' reconstructs a
> PCelt. *bato- (n.) 'death' (OIr. bath) from the root you mention
> above. If *gW&2-to-m developed semantically as 'passing' -->
> 'death', one can easily imagine *gW&2'-to-s 'that which is passed,
> way, road'. I think you've got a serious alternative for the
> Iranian etymology.