Re: [tied] Re: etruscan

And don't forget the River Tanew (a tributary of the San) very near the core area of early Gothic settlement in SE Poland. The name could easily derive from *da:nu- via Grimm's Law and some noun-class adjustment as it passed from some pre-Germanic IE language to Germanic and then to Slavic. My favourite dating for the last stages of Grimm's Law (maybe the spirantisation of aspirated *pH, *tH, *kH) is about 200 BC, when the Germani were securely established in S Poland and were already making inroads into Ukraine, but had not dispersed too wide for a common innovation (or at least a parallel tendency, like palatal umlaut more recently) to operate throughout Germanic-speaking Europe. These things (and the earliest Germanic conquests) have already been discussed on Cybalist; if you try obvious keywords such as "Bastarnae" or "Sciri", the e-group search engine will take you there.

But I still fail to see how these early events could have led to the naming the Danes as *dani- BECAUSE they were "river folk". Both Germani and Slavs had very different general words for "river", and if a specific river-name was involved (such as the Don), I can't imagine the "Don River folk" becoming the historical Danes in faraway Jutland.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Torsten Pedersen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2001 2:01 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: etruscan

--- In cybalist@egroups.com, "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote: > Connected in what way? Whatever its origin, Germanic dani- certainly does not derive from anything like PIE *da:nu- (as the river word is shakily reconstructed). Do you mean that the name of the Danes is a post-Grimm's Law borrowing from some language of the Pontic area (Sarmatian?)? How does that square with the external history of Scandinavian, Iranian, "Ruthenian", etc.?? I'm confused. > > Piotr Well, I'm confused, too. But how about this as a counter-argument: names of peoples are usually thought up not by the peoples themselves, but by their neighbours. Therefore, Grimm has no say over me (elegant, huh?). Herodotus calls Don Tanais. Pytheas mentions that he sailed (from Massilia) along the coast of the ocean (!) to Tanais. What is the sound the Greek writers here render as "t"? But you are right that if the ethnonym was "passed on" in the people itself, I would now be a Tane. Early Germanic was in contact with Finnish. Some saga mentions the Harfatha montains, obviously the Carpathians, and obviously a pre- Grimm's law borrowing. As for the logistics: Several places in the North Americans Midwest have the name of Portage's (e.g. Portage des Sioux, I think it's a suburb of St. Louis). This is where a people carried stuff from one river system to another, with or without canoe.