Re: Celtic *Flanda: 'heath, uncultivated land'

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

>
> > At any rate, a similar correspondence seems to be
> > attested in PGmc. *landa-, cf. Goth., ON land, OE land, lond, OS land,
> > OHG, MHG, MLG lant, OFris. lond, land, MDu. lant "land" (beside
> > *lendjo: in Swedish Dial. linda "fallow land", *lund- in ON lundr
> > "grove"), as against Russian ljadá "overgrown field" (cf. also
> > OPruss. lindan "valley"). The a-vocalism is also found in Celtic, cf. OIr.
> > land "open place", Welsh llann "piece of land". In spite of a possible
> > reconstruction PIE *londh-yo- (Pokorny 1959: 675), this geographical
> > term only has a limited geographical distribution and is suspect of
> > being a substratum word (cf. also Polomé 1990: 335). It appears to
> > be attested in Basque landa "field", Catalan llanda "plain" (cf.
> > Scardigli apud Lehmann 1986, s.v. land).
>
> On the other hand, the Catalan form is actually landa 'heath', surely a
> borrowing from French lande id., in turn a direct descendant of Gaulish
> *landa:. There's also the Basque collective form landar (Biscayan)
> 'uncultivated land', which along Gaulish suggests the original meaning
> was 'heath, uncultivated land'.
>

The Celtic word is itself an old collective in *-a:, later reanalyzed as a feminine.

> I'd compare the Celtic word with Gascon brana, branda 'heath', leading
> to reconstructing a voiceless labial fricative /F/ (quoted as /f/ by
> some authors) in the protoform *Flanda:. In my own model this would be
> related to other IE words meaning 'sprout', 'root' or similar,
> ultimately derived from verbal roots meaning 'to push', 'to grow' or 'to
> turn'. I hope to give further details in the future.
>

For Celtic *Flanda: I'd reconstruct a protoform *pHl@-Nd-, from *pHel@- (traditional *pelh2-) 'to set in motion' plus a (prenasalized) dental suffix. IMHO this could be related to traditional IE *bhle:-dh- 'flower'.

Similarly, Latin fro:ns, fro:ndis 'foliage, leaves' would derive from *(s)pre:-ndh- 'to pull, to stretch, to spin'. In these and other etymologies there's a semantic relationship between verbs of movement and lexicon related to plants, which is hardly surprising given their physical behaviour.