Re: Morimarusa

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

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> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
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> [...]
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> > 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.
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> 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.
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> mr.twos
> mr.t.wos
> mr.t.wos mr.s.wos
> mar.t.wos mar.s.wos
> mar.t.wos mar.s.wos mar.ws.os
> mar.t.wos mar.s.wos mar.us.os

Have you won $100 million in the lottery yet? The chance of any single shift is small. The chance of six successive shifts occurring in just the right order to produce the a-priori result you desire is not worth bothering with, unless you are a rambling, gambling man.

But your arbitrary sequence is logically superfluous anyway, since you have already declared that "some type of Celtic" must have feminine *mori, and you can just as easily declare that "some type of Celtic" must have preserved the unreduplicated participial formation in *-us-.

> These changes are T > T. after C., opt. t. > s. (among many others), and the opt. alterantion of medial -u- and -i- with -w- and -y- in VCuCV/VCCwV and VCiCV/VCCyV (some of these are much more common in some branches than others, and in some a specific environment may be greatly preferred or mandatory).

I can see what the changes are, as well as your whole problem. In your decade-long failed attempt to emulate the work of serious comparatists, you have neglected to distinguish between locally plausible sound-shifts and those which are merely globally possible. In your deluded distortion of science, any alternation documented in any language can be pressed into service to produce whatever result you want. Not satisfied with actual phonetic alternations, you also grab mere orthographic variations resulting from the lack of scribal standards over a wide region, as with the Gaulish divine names.

The result is no more convincing than that Latin dictionary compiled by the Tamil-speaker which "proved" that all Latin vocabulary came from Tamil, by changing one letter at a time.

DGK