--- In
cybalist@egroups.com, "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> More accurately the word seems to refer to the kind of valley that
is broached by rivers or streams cutting through a hillside. It can
be a coastal fjord-like thing, rather narrow, if not necessarily deep
in absolute terms, and typically wooded. "Dean" used to be an
ordinary noun (OE denu, related to denn = Modern English den; the
Germanic prototype for them is reconstructed as *danj-a-n as if from
*dHon-j-om, perhaps connected with *dHon- 'run, flow, spring forth',
but I'm only guessing here); now it's mostly toponymic (English -
dean, -den(e)). There are plenty of -dean names especially (though by
no means exclusively) in Sussex, it seems to me (more examples:
Saltdean, Standean, East Dean, etc.); the phonetically reduced
composition variant -den (Marden, Biddenden, etc.) is common in Kent
(where the Jutes settled).
>
> Piotr
>
It seems to me (and correct me if I'm wrong) that your position is
this: There are two distinct IE roots, sloppily (by me) denoted as 1.
*dh-n- "run, flow, valley with stream, etc", and 2. *d-n- "run, flow,
river, etc" and that the two are not related. Pokorny has 1., but not
2. EIEC lists both but is in doubt as how to distribute their
respective "descendants". Bomhard (IndoEuropean and the Nostratic
Hypothesis, root 83) has 1, which he relates to a Proto-Kartvelian
*den-/*din- "to run, to flow"), *dn- "to melt" (BTW, afaik IE
replaced a Caucasian language exactly in the *d-n- river area, which
doesn't make things easier), Proto Highland East Cushitic *dun- "to
leak (bag, roof), *dun-am- "to leak (water). Searching in cybalist, I
came up with Egyptian dxn- "primordial water", dnyn "a sea people".
And since I have read Oppenheimer's "Eden in the East" and found some
of the artifacts depicted therein strangely similar to what I
recalled from school excursions to Danish National Museum (and
checked it out), I leafed through a Javanese Dictionary and found:
danan "still-standing water".
To maintain your position (such as I imagined it) with two
independent IE roots, you would have to deny that words had been
loaned from elsewhere. On the other hand, I don't have a sub-, super-
or arriving-on-a-civilizing-mission-in-canoes layer to from which a
loan could have come (except for the non-IE part of Germanic).
BTW I came across the TRB (Trichterbecher) culture in EIEC. It
stretches all the way from Jutland to the river Tanew.
Torsten