From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 64834
Date: 2009-08-19
>I'm not sure what you mean by this 'staging area' (I tried to look for it in the archives but found nothing) -- are you saying that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes first gathered their soldiers in the Mälar valley? If it was the Germani waiting for 'employment' in someone's private army, what would that have to do with the increased frequency of place names in -tu:n in this region? Note also that the map shows a localized high density of such place-names in the Picardy/West Flanders region. As a place-name element in Sweden or Picardy/West Flanders, do you think it meant 'village' or some kind of 'enclosure', or 'farmstead', 'homestead', or could it have actually meant 'fence, hedge, enclosing barrier'? (See below)
> Question:
> > >
> > > Is Germanic *tu:n- (> Engl <town>, Germ <Zaun>) considered to be
> > > cognate to or an early loan from Celtic *du:n- as in OIr <du:n>
> > > 'fortress, fortified city' and Welsh <din> 'fortress' (also
> > > meanings such as 'camp', 'castle', 'fort' in these languages, not
> > > sure which)? I believe the last I read was that the Celtic words
> > > go back to PIE *dhu:n-, and the Germanic words are pre-Grimm's-
> > > Law loans from Celtic. Is this still the accepted view?
> > >
> > > What is the original meaning of this *dhu:n-? Is it closer to
> > > the Celtic meanings of 'fortified place, fortified settlement',
> > > or to the Old English meaning 'enclosure', or to the OHG meaning
> > > 'fence, hedge, enclosing barrier'? I see all of these meanings
> > > possibly unified under the basic sense 'walled town' (thereby
> > > both enclosed and fortified). This would suggest that the Old
> > > English meaning is closer to the original sense than is the OHG
> > > meaning, at least as I see it; would the present-day English
> > > meaning 'town' possibly be much older than generally believed,
> > > and go back to the original meaning 'walled town' without any
> > > intervening OE meanings like 'yard, garden, field, manor, farm,
> > > homestead, house, village'? Or is the Proto-Germanic meaning
> > > definitely 'enclosing barrier' as in OHG and German is therefore
> > > more conservative than English (which only had the meaning
> > > 'enclosed place' and developments of this basic meaning,
> > > apparently) at least within Germanic?
> > >
> > > Anybody care to answer these questions?
> > >
> > > Andrew
> > >
> > > Watkins mentions that these words are limited to Celtic and
> > > Germanic. So it may be Celtic subtrate. If I had to guess an
> > > original meaning, I'd say "height, hill", see English dune and
> > > down "hill" < ? Briton and see "citadel, fortified high place" as
> > > secondary meanings and "town" as a tertiary meaning
> > >
> >
> >
> > I just see where the American Heritage Dictionary derives all of
> > these from the root *dheu&- "to close, finish, come full circle".
> > From this point of view the meaning 'enclosure' would be the
> > earliest (and I don't know whether the sense 'enclosed space' or
> > 'enclosing barrier' would be earlier, I'd like to find out), from
> > which 'walled town' might develop, then 'fortified height', then
> > 'height, hill' (as OE <du:n> > NE <down> and MDu <du:ne> 'sandy
> > hill' > NE <dune>).
> >
> > To me it seems that two different roots are involved: one that
> > means 'a height' (thence in one stream 'hill', in another
> > 'fortified height, castle, walled town'), and one that might mean
> > 'to close, finish, come full circle' (thence 'enclosure', thence in
> > one stream 'enclosed place, yard, village, town' and in another
> > 'fence, hedge' -- but to me it seems the first stream could also
> > have been 'enclosed place' > 'walled town' > 'town'?). In any case
> > I think American Heritage's lumping all of these together is
> > probably a bit of a stretch. I don't think it's natural to derive
> > the word for 'hill' from a root meaning 'close, finish, come full
> > circle'. I think they may have done this only to make *dheu&- seem
> > close in meaning to *dheu- 'die'. I would assign the Germanic
> > words to another root *deu&- or similar. The sense 'finish, come
> > full circle' might be close enough to the meaning 'long, to last'
> > for *deu&- in Latin <du:ra:re> and Greek <de:rós> 'long'.
> >
>
> Other than the English "town" and German "fence" sense, there's Dutch tuin "garden" and Swedish and Danish tun "space between the houses in a village".
>
> You might want to look at the map of -tu:n used in placenames in the 'Maps from Udolph' folder in the Files section. Pretty interesting distribution. Note the overwhelming density of occurrences in England and that a similar density is found only in the Mälar valley in Sweden (the heart of the land of the Svear) and in what I suspected was a 'staging area' for the invasion of England, or rather where the Germani were waiting for 'employment' in someone's private army, in a discussion long ago. Brian didn't like it.
>
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