From: stlatos
Message: 65780
Date: 2010-02-03
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:The existence of fem. in Gmc doesn't mean it originated in Gmc or that other branches didn't have a fem., also. There were many varieties of Celtic besides Gaulish and the ones ancestral to modern languages; known words (usually names) varied a lot over a large geographic area, and even in the same place. There's no reason to assume anything other than some type of Celtic for 'dead sea', especially since the derivation takes into account only those changes that I know well and have seen often in many words.
> > > from the east, they were not closely related to Germanic. The one
> > > word we have in Cimbric in Morimarusa "dead sea" of the Skagerrak.
> > > That doesn't look Germanic. Cf. Lat. mortu-, Venetic murtuv-, ChSl.
> > > mrUtvU, Celtic marwo-.
> We might consider the possibility that <Morimarusa> and <Cimbri> come from an unshifted Proto-Germanic dialect. According to Pliny, "Philemon Morimarusam a Cimbris vocari scribit; hoc est mare mortuum usque ad promunturium Rubeas, ultra deinde Cronium." If, as seems likely, this was the comedian Philemon of Syracuse, who came to Athens around 330 BCE and died in 262, the Cimbrian gloss probably comes from Pytheas of Massilia, and was collected sometime around 300.
>
> Many scholars have taken <Morimarusa> as Celtic for 'Mare Mortuum', but Celtic *mori (Irish <muir> etc.) is neuter. The Celtic place-name Hellenized as <Morikámbe:> (now Morecambe Bay, Lancs.) is to be understood not as 'Curved Sea' but as a determinative compound 'Sea-Curve', like <Moridunum> 'Sea-Fort'. On the basis of Irish <marb>, Welsh <marw>, and Gaulish morphology, we should expect *Mori Marwon for 'Dead Sea', which would be Hellenized into something like *Morimárouon, a far cry from the Plinian form.
>
> Germanic however does have a feminine *mari:- (Gothic <marei>, which retains the long stem because it went over to the weak declension, and Old Saxon <meri>). If the second part of our Cimbrian name means 'dead', its formation can be analyzed as an unreduplicated zero-grade perfect active participle. The morphological parallel is 'knowing', Epic Greek fem. nom. sg. <iduîa>, Sanskrit <vidús.i:>, PIE *wid-ús-ih2 from *weid- 'to see, know'. The root *mer- 'to die, be dead' would then have a corresponding fem. nom. sg. part. *mr.-ús-ih2.