Re: [tied] Dirmar

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> OK, I'll leave your idols alone ;), though not all
> of them were linguists, strictly speaking. Tomaschek
> was a historical geographer and ethnographer;
> M�nchen-Helfen was a versatile scholar, but did not
> specialise in linguistics. In such matters they had
> to rely on other people's opinions.

*****GK: Which makes it all the more interesting to
find out just who Tomaschek relied on. As for
Maenchen-Helfen, he is adjudged to have possessed
"exceptional philological competence" by the
signatories of the Foreword to his volume (Guitty
Azarfay, Peter A. Boodberg, Edward H Schafer). And one
doesn't have to rely on authority to realize this. The
scholar who wrote stuff like "Are Chinese HSI-P'I and
KUO-Lo IE Loan Words?" (Language 21 (1945), 256-260),
"Germanic and Hunnic Names of Iranian Origin", Oriens
(1957), 280-283, plus many other onomastic studies, is
more than "apparently" a linguist whatever else he may
be.****

>(PG) Talking of "apparent proofs" smacks of

sophistry.

*****GK: Well no it doesn't really, since it is a
technical expression of mediaeval logicians, and these
people certainly knew the difference between apparent
proof and sophistical argumentation. In any case we
have "apparently" said all that we care to say on
this.*****

>
>
>PG) {AUKHATA, CATIARI] remain elusive because their

historical context

> is so nebulous and there is too little hard evidence
> to constrain our speculation. One can invent any
> number of "apparent etymologies", but the problem is
> how to _eliminate_ The case of <aukHatai> is
> marginally less hopeless, because the name belongs
> to a recognisable pattern (the *-ta: collective),
> and the question is how to interpret *auka:- or
> *auxa:-. One (very tentative) possibility is *aukah-
> (Indo-Aryan okas- 'house, settlement' < *aukas- <
> *h1eukes-, from *h1euk- 'get accustomed', cf. Slavic
> *uk-/*vyk- and Lith ukis 'village'), so that the
> ethnonym would make sense as "villagers, sedentary
> farmers".

******GK: So it looks like I was pretty close to
grasping the possible meaning even though my
etymologizing was defective.*****

>
> *****GK: And now my extraneous question. What do you
> make of "Rosomoni" in the text of Jordanes where he
> discusses the events in Hermanaric's state just
> prior to the Hun invasions? I've seen it interpreted
> as, if I remember correctly, "Roso-monji" (Iranic,
> perhaps Ossetian?) = "Ros-men". Would that make
> sense? If not what other interpretation might be
> useful?******
>
> (PG)I suspect the first element, if Iranian, may be
> *rauxs^a- > *roxs^a- 'bright, shining' (cf. Oss.
> ruxs/roxs 'bright') < *leuk-s-o-, as in the name of
> the Roxolani 'Bright Alans'. I'm not sure how to
> interpret <-mon->. A derivative of *manu- 'thinking
> creature, man' is not impossible, though in Ossetic
> at least the pre-nasal rounding of /a/ took place
> much later.

****GK: Noted. Thanks.******

>
> Piotr
>

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