Re: [tied] Danaan as ethnonym.

Mark and Glen,

I can accept that there may have been people who called themselves the "River Folk" based on /danu/, but I find the idea of this as a general ethnonym hard to accept. There may well have been others who called themselves "Highlanders", or "Cattle People" or whatever. And, as an ethnonym, Dan- doesn't seem particularly common amongst the IE's, even though its occurrences may be widely spread.

I can't comment on Glen's reply because I know nothing about the Nenets/Enets, however your /Teuta-/ type names seem to rather support my opposition to this idea. I don't think it's particularly remarkable that various peoples or groups just called themselves "The People". And even there, it was the Irish who named the Tuatha De Danann. And who and when first started using terms such as Dutch or Deutsch? The Dutch don't call themselves Dutch. Was there ever a people who called themselves Teutons or their language Teutonic, other than the medieval Latin scribes who used the term "teodisca lingua"? Surely it's significant that the Germanic peoples who remained outside the Carolingian Empire - the English, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes - don't employ a derivative of this term.

Likewise for the Slavs - wasn't it the Germans who coined this as a general term for all the various Slavic peoples? No doubt it is based on a slavic word, but did the Slavs use it for themselves, or did just one particular group call themselves by this name?

Cheers

Dennis

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Saturday, 26 August, 2000 3:50 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Danaan as ethnonym.

I was going to respond to Dennis, but Glen's response says it better. His example of Enets/Nenets is a better one than what I would have given, the Dutch/Deutsch/Tuatha/Teuton example. A prime example, though, are the words Slavonian, Slovenian, Slovakian, Sorbian, Slavonic and just plain Slav, all reflexes of the same ethnonym.

I agree, however, that IEs, or a least a subset of them, would not have thought of themselves as a single unitary people.

Mark.

From: Glen Gordon

Dennis: >In general, given the later tribal organisation of the Celts, Germans > >etc., I think it's unlikely that the IE's would have had such a >concept >of unity amongst themselves as to give themselves an all >encompassing >name. These kind of generic names seem to be generally >given by outsiders. But... careful. Afterall, look at the Nenetsand the Enets. They both call themselves by the same name (even though the pronunciation is different).They are speaking different languages, albeit related ones. Ket and the extinctrelated language, Kott, might be another yummy example. I think it's the same with the IE peoples.There may have been a popular name like *Danuom (?) that they used to call themselves, which is not to say that they were "united" any more or less than the Nenets and the Enets are. Rather, it's because of theirshared ancestry that these ethnonyms persist for centuries. Just a thought.