Re: [tied] Germanic decads

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

From: Steve Woodson

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 4:42 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Germanic decads

Piotr,

    Do you, or any of the other members know where I might find anything on Crimean Gothic?  Peter Heather "THE GOTHS" omits them with barely a mention.

                          Steve 

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

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, March 26, 2001 4:41 PM

Subject: [tied] Germanic decads

In response to Miguel's question, here's an outline of my personal theory about the origin of upper decad names in Gothic.

 

First, let's take stock of the most important forms of "ten" found in Germanic. PIE *dek^m > PGmc. *texun > *texu, with *tixun ~ *texun restored dialectally from the i-inflected variant *texuni.

 

The form *texu became declinable as a noun and was reinterpreted as a u-stem (neuter *téxu- or masculine *texú-s > *tegu- ~ *tigu- ~ *tugu-, cf. OIcel. tigr 'set of ten'). West Germanic tended to generalise invariant *-teg ~ *-tig ~ *-tug in decad names, but Gothic (as well as Old Scandinavian) retained inflected forms in the numerals 20-60: Goth. Acc. tiguns, Gen. tigiwe, Dat. tigum. The Gothic nominative is unattested but can be reconstructed as [+ Verner] *tigjus < *tigiwiz (cf. OIcel. tiger).

 

The big question is how to interpret the -tê- element in the Gothic names of the upper decads:

 

 70  sibuntêhund

 80  ahtautêhund

 90  niuntêhund

100  taíhuntêhund/taíhuntaíhund

 

Szemerényi's hypothesis (which assumes the generalisation of *penkWe-dk^omt > *penkWe:k^omt > *fimfe:xund, hence analogical *seftune:xund > metathesised *sefunte:xund > Goth. sibuntêhund, and so forth) is paper linguistics: *fimfe:xund is not attested at all (nor is *seftun) and the chain of analogical changes needed to extract <-têhund> involves ad hoc solutions. Hypotheses assuming têhund < *de:k^mt- fare little better, since there is no independent evidence of such a vriddhied form. The interpretation of <-tê-> as a preposition ("seven to a hundred") hardly merits discussion.

 

It should be emphasised that the problematic forms are characteristically Gothic rather than common Germanic -- cf. such straightforward formations as OIcel. siau tiger, átta tiger, níu tiger, tío tiger (cf. fimm tiger ~ fimtigi '50', etc.), OHG sibunzug, ahtozug ~ ahzech, niunzug, zëhanzug ~ zênzech (= hunt). A similar use of <hund> in decad names is found in West Germanic (most consistently in Old English), but there <hund> comes first:

 

 70  hund-seofontig

 80  hund-eahtatig

 90  hund-nigontig

100  hund-têontig (= hund)

110  hund-aendlaeftig

120  hund-twelftig

 

The correspondence <sibuntêhund> = <hund-seofontig> suggests that the correct division of <sibuntêhund> is <sibuntê-hund>, where <-tê> corresponds to <-tig>. Since <-tê> can hardly derive from Goth. *-tigjus, we can hypothesise that the more archaic neuter variant *-texu < *-téxu: survives here:

 

*sibuntexuxunda- > *sibunte:xunda (haplology combined with compensatory lengthening)

 

I don't think this dialectal use of <hund> in upper decad names has anything to do with the original function of PIE *dk^mtóm as a Gen.pl. form ("of sets of ten"). It's quite evident that <hund> in these constructions means simply "a hundred (or something of that order anyway)", and that the decad names in the range 70-120 denoted such "approximate hundreds" in an explicit manner, with some redundancy.

 

(A curiosity: Crimean Gothic had <sada> '100', an Iranian loan.)

 

Comments welcome.

 

Piotr

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