Re: Rozwadowski's Change

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

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Haste makes waste. I should have checked Emergewe in Google Books
> > before guessing. The prevailing view is that it is a
> > Schreibfehler;
>
> Apparently there was no other way for them to explain it.
>
> > one source cites as old forms of Emsgau: Emisga, Emisgowe,
> > Emisgewe, and the "ganz schlechte Schreibart" Emergewe.
>
> Value judgment.
>
> > Some details of the text are given by H. Jaekel, "Zur Lexicologie
> > des Altfriesischen", PBB 15:532-6 (1891):
>
> Note, Old Frisian. Non-Germanic survivals to be expected.

The forms with -s- are already non-Germanic in origin, no?

> > "Aus lanthura [i.e. 'land-tax'] hat der schreiber Lanthusa
> > [a phantom place-name] gemacht.
>
> -husa? As far as I know, the "hire" word is without etymology, and first used in maritime vocabulary (so still in Danish). I propose it is a Verner doublet of *hu:s-ja- "to house", eg. "to hire" is to house sby, to take him into your household.

I like that. Gmc. *xu:rjo: 'payment, land-tax' would originally be 'payment for housing', pre-shifted *ku:syá: beside *kú:som 'house, housing, building'. The restriction of *xu:rjo: and *xu:rjan 'to pay for services, house, hire' to the NWB area suggests that feudalism was imposed there when the Germans took over, AFTER Grimm and Verner, with terminology that became obsolete elsewhere. What we need is to identify more Gmc. words (as opposed to historically NWB words) restricted to the NWB area in order to develop a fuller theory of this takeover. Sailors presumably were escaping the confines of feudalism. "Seeluft macht frei!"

> > Er verwechselt s und r sehr haeufig; so schreibt er z.b. 'videmus'
> > statt 'videmur',
>
> Could be bad grammar, not Schreibfehler.

Or simple absent-mindedness, writing 'we see' for the less common 'we seem'. I have not yet looked at the full text.

> 'Wisaha' statt 'Wiraha',
>
> River? *Wis- is common in river names.

And in Visburgii, Viscellae, Vispii. Unclear are Wiesbaden (Uuisibada 830), Wiesenbronn (Wisibrunnen), and a few other names upon which *wisu- 'good' may have had folk-etymological influence. Perhaps even the Visigothi belong here. Streitberg rejected the vulgate interpretation 'West Goths' in favor of 'Good Goths', but the third century seems rather early for a stem-shift. For that matter Ptolemy's <Ouisboúrgioi> seems much too early for the stem-vowel syncope required if Streitberg's 'die gute Bergen besitzenden' is correct.

I did consider the possibility that <Wisaha> is copied right and refers to some other stream than Wiraha. However, Jaekel seems to know his East Frisian geography. The forms <Hunergewe> and <Heterheim> are otherwise identical to those with -s-, and that is not what we would predict for Gmc./NWB doublets. Indeed we have no expectation of NWB words beginning with /h/ at all. If these are genuine doublets not resulting from sloppy scribal s/r-Wechsel, the most we can say is that some Old East Frisian dialect might have rhotacized /s/ in this position. And actual rhotacism is not really necessary. The original scribe might have performed false phonemic analysis, regarding a mere voiced /s/ as closer to his own /r/. All we could then conclude is that some allophones were heard wrongly by a scribe accustomed to a different dialect. This is the sort of thing represented by satirical spellings like <Filhelmshawen> and <teschnich>.

> 'More' fuer 'Mose',
>
> cf. German Moor, Engl. moor, Da. mose

Point taken.

> 'Wacheringe' fuer 'Wachesinge', 'Emergewe' fuer 'Emesgewe', 'Hunergewe' fuer 'Hunesgewe', 'Heterheim' fuer 'Hetesheim'."
>
> All place names, so rejecting the Verner variants here because they are supposedly Schreibfehler would be circular.

They might not be Schreibfehler, but assuming that we have evidence for Grimm without Verner, a Holy Grail for shift-daters, requires much more than the peculiarities of a single MS.

> > Thus we cannot use Emergewe and Hunergewe as evidence for some
> > "Verner-free" area.

> I don't think Kuhn did that, rather he thought it showed vacillation, like Weser/Werra

No problem with initial /w/. Big problem with initial /h/ in supposedly non-Gmc. forms. The vacillation is areal at any rate.

> > > Objection, they would, or at least within a sufficiently small
> > > distance that it was known to them; only as long as Grimm's law
> > > functioned as a sociological marker between the incoming elite
> > > and the locals would Grimm's law be applied to local place names,
> > > after the hierarchical relationship is established the upper
> > > class will feel they can 'afford' to pronounce local names the
> > > local way; this means only backwaters get to keep the original
> > > non-Grimm names. Cf.
> > > http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
> >
> > I was thinking along the lines of York (old Eboracum 'Yewplace').
> > The initial /y/ was produced regularly in Old Norse, but not when
> > they dominated the place. It was the name of a FOREIGN place when
> > the change occurred.
>
> I didn't know that. Tell me about it.

The British name *Ebura:kon 'Yew-Place' (preserved in Welsh <Efrog>) was folk-etymologized into Old English <Eoforwíc> 'Boar-Town'. Old Norse <Jórvík> 'Boar-Bay' cannot come directly from this but must represent an earlier *Jøfurvík, this in turn from an early ON borrowing of the OE name, well before the Norse occupation in 867.

> > Similarly, Coriovallum could have been known
> > to Germans before the shift, and a foreign place when the /k/
> > became the /x/ later reflected as /h/ in Heerlen.
>
> I said that too. It's even likely the name was given by the Germani, considering the importance of the *xar-j- stem, but if so in the pre-Grimm phase. Wrt it supporting your claim of an earlier Grimm: I don't think so; Coriovallum AFAIK was [n]ot an important place (cf. Du. Straatburg "Strasbourg", it's on the Rhine route, which was vital for Dutch economy, and therefore vital for the French to seize).

If an army guarded a wall there, it must have had some importance at some time. French has plenty of names for Italian towns like Perugia which did not come from modern Italian. Perugia has no obvious political or economic importance today, but it must have been important to some of the French at some time.

DGK