Re: Town, Zaun, and Celtic Dun-

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
> >
> > > 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.
> > >
> > >
> > I'm not sure what you mean by this 'staging area' (I tried to look
> > for it in the archives but found nothing) --
>
> Try from here:
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/29106
>
> > are you saying that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes first gathered
> > their soldiers in the Mälar valley?
>
> No. See below.
>
> > 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?
>
> A lot of young males waiting for employment in a violent enterprise. Securing your accommodation would be a good idea.

Are you saying that these Germani found accomodation in tu:ns, which I would assume here had its Old Icelandic meaning of 'homestead, farmstead, or enclosure with a house in it'? Then they named the settlements where they lived after these tu:ns where they found accomodation? Or am I completely misreading you?

>
> > 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)
>
> I just came up with this one to explain what the Mälar valley has to do with it:
> There is an old theory that the then important town of Sigtuna
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigtuna
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Sigtuna
> is a translation of Celtic Segodunum. The present conviction is that it's from *si:k- "humid ground, etc" and the 'civilian' meaning of *tu:n.

What is the 'civilian' meaning of *tu:n? What is its 'military' meaning?

Supposing (like I do) that the invasion of Svear to Svealand was the last territorial expansion before the conquest of England, the equation Sig-tuna = Sego-dunum in people's minds might have changed the meaning of tu:n at the next conquest.

That makes sense, as the origin of the change in meaning of tu:n, but by 'next conquest' do you mean the conquest of England? Of course this conquest didn't originate in Sweden but it sounds like you're saying that the change of meaning that tu:n underwent in England can be traced back to Sweden, specifically Sigtuna.

>
>
> > In any case, what is meant by 'space between the houses in a
> > village'? This suggests yard-space (where side-yards meet between
> > houses) to me.
>
> I don't think I even know what a side yard is.

My apologies! Sometimes I can't seem to think of the right way of expressing myself. I meant "where the sides of the yards meet between houses". "side-yard" was my quick invention for something that was eluding me.

In this part of the world, farms used to be built as three or four longish buildings set at right angles around a courtyard.

Does this mean that by 'space between the houses in a village' you mean something like the above typical courtyard of a farm, surrounded by three or four buildings forming a square or open-ended square?

>
> I've seen 'tun' defined in some Sw. dial. as a cattle path between houses.
> Here's Hellquist
> http://runeberg.org/svetym/1115.html
> I've looked at de Vries' definition, but I'm not impressed by it, so I'll leave it out.
>
> > Or are you talking about old in-earth settlements
> > with stone walls, which would have a space or corridor between
> > individual house sites (bounded by these stone walls)?
>
> What's an in-earth settlement?

Again I apologize for my illiteracy. I was thinking of those very old settlements that had houses with a stone foundation in the earth, and which did not rise very high above ground level, and which were made partly of piled stones and partly of thatch or similar, with property boundaries marked out by stone walls. I had in mind the Viking settlements at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, which I've seen on TV, and similar old settlements in the Orkney and Shetland islands, etc.

> Within the village, houses usually didn't have private space around them, I believe. That came with the agricultural reforms of the late 18th cent., when houses were moved out of their village to individual cultivation areas.

So if the villages were laid out like the farms, they had a common space between them in the form of a courtyard? And this was the tu:n?
Or do you mean that tu:n in Sweden mainly referred to that cattle-path between houses? Then what about Sigtuna et al.?

>
> > I found that Bosworth-Toller mentions OIcel 'tún' meant, in
> > addition to 'farmstead', 'homestead', also 'an enclosure within
> > which a house is built' -- suggesting to me those old in-earth
> > settlements. If this was the original meaning of *tu:nam in Gmc,
> > it sounds like a miniature version of a 'walled town'. The other
> > languages have, according to Bosworth-Toller: OFris 'fence', OLG
> > (=OS?) 'stone or brick wall' ('maceria'), OHG 'fence, hedge
> > ('sepis'), stone or brick wall' ('maceria'), Norwegian 'court,
> > farmyard', and Du 'garden, fence'. I desire to know what is
> > considered to be the most original of these meanings -- if it _is_
> > borrowed from Celtic, it seems the OIcel and OE ('enclosure with
> > houses, village') meanings are probably closer to the original
> > Celtic meaning than are the OHG, OLG, and OFris meanings, would you
> > agree? But if the Germanic and Celtic words go back to an IE root
> > meaning 'to close, finish, come full circle', then the OHG, OLG,
> > and OFris meanings could well be the earlier -- what do you think?
>
> Problem is, you're not the only one. Those dictionaries I've seen seem to treat it like an open question.
>
> > I'm eager to know for personal reasons.
>
> BTW, my paternal grandfather's first name was Gerhard. I puzzles me, since it's not a common name in Denmark.
>
>

I added 'for personal reasons' because I wasn't sure anyone would reply to my message, so I thought maybe that would make it seem more urgent or important for someone to reply (thanks, by the way!). What I was referring to by 'personal reasons' was not related to my name or family or anything, but merely my 'personal hobby', in which I create hypothetical languages that could have evolved from Old English (without so much Latin and French as modern English) or from Old Saxon, the languages I feel for because of their history. I knew that if I said all this it would probably not lead to a response, so I left it as 'personal reasons'. Thanks again! By the way, one of my languages has 295 pages of vocabulary and grammar so far, others have between 80 and 250 (including some hypothetical IE descendants rather than West Germanic). Not that it matters.

Maybe your grandfather's name was of German origin?

Andrew

>