From: neckfil
Message: 64865
Date: 2009-08-20
>There is a town in Scotland Dumbarton. It was known toward its early history as dun breatainn, meaning the fort of the Brits. It's from Scottish Gaelic, a branch of brythonic, just like welsh. So, it seems, the cognate was known across ancient Britain well before historical invasion happened. The word surly indicates an enclosure, fort, later town, and may have had the same origin as some verbs that describe encircling of a possession, or encircling altogether. I wonder weather there is a correlation between dunen and kreisen. They seem to be two separate cognates, though, they mean the same thing. I think that dun simply can be matched with the IE dom/dome.
> 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
>