Re: Odp: IE Lithuanian-Mediterranean connections

From: Sergejus Tarasovas
Message: 1725
Date: 2000-02-29

-----Original Message-----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski [mailto:gpiotr@...]
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 2:14 PM
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: IE Lithuanian-Mediterranean connections

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2000 6:24 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: IE Lithuanian-Mediterranean connections

> Just a comment on 'amber'. Both 'amber' words (amber proper and
ambergris, or the sperm whale secretion) are the same. They are derived
from Mediaeval Latin ambar < Arabic 'anbar 'ambergris', hence
'brownish-yellow'. The technical Polish word is bursztyn (a German
loan), but the mineral is also known as jantar (ultimately an East
Baltic word, cf. Lithuanian gintaras, Latvian dzitars). I've no idea if
an etymology has been proposed for it. The Old Prussian word was still
different, gli:sis, cf. Latin gle:sum (in Tacitus' report of the
Aestii). The etymology of Greek e:lektron is obscure (at least to me at
the moment), but it looks IE, with the 'instrument' suffix *-trom. 

Two notes.
1. The Baltic origin of 'jantar' has not been proven so far. In fact,
the only proof is that it was the traditional Balts trade (still not
proven that Tacitus' Aestii were the Balts, BTW). It's not surprising
that you have no idea about it's etymology - all the attempts to give
the BALTIC one have failed. Considering the fact that Lithuanian
dialects have 'jintaras/jentaras' along with 'gintaras', as well as the
fact that the formant -tar- is a very typical one for the Indo-Aryan
languages (I mean those to the North of the Black sea, their presence
is attested by hydronymy), we can suppose that Lithuanian and Latvian
words were borrowed from Eastern Slavic (cf. Russian jantar'), which
with a help of some mediators eventually borrowed it from the speakers
of some Indo-Aryan language.
2. Tacitus' 'gle:sum' is not Latin, it's rather a Latinised German
word, a cognate of 'glass' and one of the many descendants of PIE root
*gel- 'something round and/or smooth and glossy'
1. Yes, the suffix looks as if it could be Iranian, but what about the Slavic intermediary? A vowel-nasal sequence would have given a Slavic nasal vowel which should have survived in Polish and be denasalised to a in Russian, so we would have something like Polish *jętar and Russian *jatar. Both the Russian and the Polish words as actually attested look rather like borrowings from Lithuanian (variation between je-/ja- is common in northern Polish dialects), and I'm not aware of anything that could be interpreted as a trace of the putative Iranian loan in Slavic. The word may have been borrowed to and fro between the neighbouring Baltic and Slavic dialects, but I still find no clue as to where that game began. Perhaps you could provide more arguments in favour of Iranian origins, e.g. suggest a meaning for the *jVn- (*gin-?) part. The whole question is worth further discussion.
 
2. It seems very reasonable to connect gle:sum with Germanic *glas-, whatever the technical details.
 
Piotr


  




 As attested by some sources, the Old Russian form of 
the word would look like *енътарь. The Lithuanian and Polish 
forms well may be late borrowings from Russian, after the fall of "yers". 
Another argument is that in Lithuanian folklore there are no stable compounds 
like gintaras+adjective (or at least they are not known to me) 
. In contrast, in Russian we find a very interesting (and regular) paraphrastic 
construction камень бел-горючь 'a burning stone of white', 
which can hardly be explained on a Russian basis and may well be a semantic 
carbon copy from some Indo-Iranian (I would insist on that Indo-) language. That 
could be a clue to this mysteriuos *(j)enV.


 


Sergei.