In Dutch we don't have something like "to
jump" AFAIK (though there is such a word in Frisian as another post said).
We have the words "hoppen" (to hop), and "hobbelen" (to bump
repeatedly), "hobbelig" (bumpy, rough (road)), "hobbel"
(knob), "hobbelpaard" (rocking horse) etc. Van Dale's Etymologisch
Woordenboek says "hoppen" & "huppen" cf. Greek
"kubistan" (tumble) - perhaps not so ludicrous? --Marc
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. Piotr