Re: Prehistoric Ethnogenic Processes and Onomatopoeia

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 239
Date: 1999-11-12

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Tommy Tyrberg
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 1999 10:47 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: SV: Odp: Prehistoric Ethnogenic Processes

"Jump" might be a medieval borrowing from Old Norse, there is a somewhat
similar word in Danish: gumpe 'move up and down'.
Hoppian is undoubtedly the original word. It has cognates in most West and
North Germanic languages, e. g. Swedish hoppa. The Common Germanic form
would have been *huppian. It is not attested in Gothic as far as I know.

Tommy
I know of the Danish connection; one of the dictionaries I've consulted also cites Swedish gumpa, but I don't know if that's correct. But even if the word were reconstructible back to Old Norse, I'd have grave doubts about the possibility of jump being a Norse loanword: how would you explain the palatalisation of the initial before a back vowel?? Jump might result from some kind of Hupty-Dumpty-style hybridisation, say, jig + gump = jump, but gump is unattested in Middle English (Forrest Gump is a different affair; I don't know the etymology of Scottish gumption 'initiative'). At any rate jump is not an inherited word, and that was my point.
 
The Danish word could be compared with Yaghnobi jumb- 'move rapidly'; similar words apparently occur in Modern Persian and Tajik. But the Iranian palatal is also difficult to explain historically and I don't know of a related word in Sogdian or any other older Iranian language. Jumb- is most likely an areal half-onomatopoeic Wanderwort. If we were to compare words attested only in a handful of modern languages (geographically and genetically close in either cluster) and not really reconstructible to Proto-Germanic of Proto-Iranian, we would be guilty of "reaching down" -- a practice for which Nostratic scholars are often (and justly) castigated. This, combined with the possibly sound-symbolic value of the phonetic form of the word, provides sufficient reason for abandoning the etymology.
 
As for hoppian, I didn't say it can't be Proto-Germanic; I just said PIE *kub- would be ludicrous. *Hupp- sounds reasonably onomatopoeic to me. Still, projecting shared onomatopoeic roots onto the protolanguage is always a risky thing to do. English cuckoo corresponds to German Kuckuck, but in the common ancestor of English and German the word for 'cuckoo' was *gaukaz. In Modern Polish the bird is called kukułka, other Slavic languages have such words as kukučka, kukavica, kukavka, etc., but the reconstructible Proto-Slavic word for 'cuckoo' was something like *žegъza, whose reflexes survive only in dialects, but which has Baltic connections and looks like a reduplicated variant of the Germanic protoform. Of course we also have Latin cucūlus, but it's perhaps more surprising to learn that some languages have, or have had, non-onomatopoeic names for the cuckoo. Supposing (quite plausibly) that the PIEs had something like **ku'ku(:)-s (I'll double-star purely hypothetical forms), Grimm's and Verner's laws would have turned that into Old English **hugu, and that would have developed into ModE **how or the like; on the Slavic side we would get PSl **kъky > Polish **kiew or **kiekwa. Needless to say, nothing of the sort is attested. Onomatopoeic words often seem to violate the regular sound laws; if affected by them, they lose their sound-symbolic force and need "refreshing" (or rather replacement by new imitative words) from time to time.