From: dgkilday57
Message: 68346
Date: 2012-01-03
>I have no doubt that all the above reflect *perkW-, but <Hercynia> cannot reflect an inherited Celtic word, since both Celtic and Italic assimilate *p...kW... to *kW...kW... (hence Latin <quercus>). As the Volcae were associated with Hercynia, and were encountered by the Germans before the Celts were (hence *Walxa- as the Gmc. term for 'southern foreigner'), I suspect that Volcan *Perku:nia: (with *kW > *k as in their self-name 'Wolves') was borrowed into Proto-Celtic after the *p...kW... assimilation but before the loss of inherited *p, hence PCelt *Ferku:n-, *Herku:n- to the Greek geographers who got the name from Celtic. *Arku:n- and *Orku:n- attest different routes of the same name to the Greeks.
> I should probably read what's been written at lengths before, but I'm lazy.
>
> <Hercynia> is seen as a latinization of a Celtic word corresponding to
> Gmc. *fergun- "mountain". Today it struck me that if Lith. <Perkunas>
> "god of heaven and thunder", ON <Fjörgyn> "mother of Thor" is the same
> word, that would give us an independent example of the IE dualism
> "stone/hammer" ~ "sky" that we glean from the "hammer" word.
> And now I'm thinking: Since the Hercynian forest spanned across centralThe problem here is that the Carpathians appear in Old Norse as Harfadh- (I am lacking edh today). Whatever the origin of this name, it was known to the Germans before the consonant-shift, and it is unlikely that *Fergu:n- specifically referred to the same area.
> Europe from the Rhine to the horizon of the known world, is it actually
> possible that *perkW-un- is reconstructable for Indo-European not only
> as a generic "mountain (range)" but as a toponym designing the
> Carpathian mountains, and could that be the very origin of the IE
> semantic duality? Would the Carpathians be the "sky mountains" seen from
> the Pontic plain? Would that be where the god of thunder killed the
> dragon and unleashed the waters?
> [The reason I came to think of this was Bjorvand & Lindeman's entry forHubschmid, in regard to the Jura Mountains and related appellatives, discussed the connection between 'oak-forest' and 'forested mountain' ('Berg', 'Bergwald', usw.), and this is probably another example. That is, if the primary sense of *perkWu- is 'oak', we can easily get to 'oak-forest' and 'forested mountain' in derivatives, then back to 'pine-forest' and 'pine' in appropriate areas. Oaks are supposedly immune to lightning (also laurels, eagles, and seals, if you believe the ancients), so the transfer of *perkWu- to the epithet of the thunder-god, which could easily become his name, is straightforward. In the Norse case, the connection with hammering may have arisen independently. With a great deal of smith-work going on in their economy, thunder could easily be portrayed as divine hammering.
> <furu> "pine tree". It's easily derived from IE *perkW-, but,
> paraphrasing, the semantic shift is almost unsurmountable unless we take
> the common origin to be a mere descriptive "mountain tree" as in OE
> <ferg'enbea:m>. My reason for looking was actually the word <bark>
> "barch", thinking it might be something like a back-formation from
> compounds with *perkW-, providing another possible semantic bridge. But
> "mountain" is better.]