From: "Torsten Pedersen" <
tgpedersen@...>
Just my thro'pence of unlearned comment on the margin of your
linguistic discussions about Denmark:
Denmark in Polish used to be called Dunia (now Dania) and "Dunin"
was the inhabitant of that land. On Trajan's colun and on his coins
there is a river god inscribed Danuvius which is linked to Danube
(Polish: Dunaj) and many rivers rivers are called Don (at least two
in Great Britain, let alone the famous Don and Donetz).
English "dene" is today used more in the sense of
a "deep, narrow, wooded vale of a rivulet". In the very early texts
"dene" is often used in conjunction with "tears"
("in dene of teres")
As Brueckner mentions "dunaj" was used as a word for any kind of
water, especially in folk songs.
Danes were sea-faring people so it seems likely that their nickname
was derived from the word for "water"
- *danu-" or whatever it
Stefan
> 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. > replaced a
Caucasian language exactly in the *d-n- river area, which doesn't
make things easier), > 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