Re: [tied] Skuggva

The West Germanic (Old English and Old High German) forms of the same word mean "shadow". I wonder if it's related to _show_, _schauen_ (OE _sceawian_). I'll look it up.

Piotr

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

From: Håkan Lindgren

To: Cybalist

Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 7:37 AM

Subject: [tied] Skuggva

A while ago, Piotr wrote the following -

Verschärfung seems to have arisen parallelly but independently in Gothic and Scandinavian. There are examples of early Runic forms without it; such forms are also preserved as loans in Finnish (e.g. kuva 'picture' : Gothic skuggva 'mirror').

In modern Swedish, skugga means "shadow". This word, meaning "mirror", "shadow" and "picture" made me interested. I looked it up in two books and got two different etymologies. It could either derive from an IE root meaning "to cover", which is also found in the word "shoe" and, possibly, in "sky" (I could never have imagined that there was a connection between "shoe", "shadow" and "sky"!). Or it could derive from a root meaning "to shine", "to shimmer".

Does anyone know more about this word and its connections in different languages? What was the original meaning of Gothic "skuggva" - did it originally mean "shadow"? If it didn't - what was the Gothic word for "shadow"?

Hakan