<-s> _is_ the regular Gothic
development of PGmc. *-az in the "strong masculine" declension. It reflects PIE
*-os, and so is cognate to Lat. -us, Gk. -os, Skt. -aH, OCS -U, Lith. -as,
etc. The ending was dropped in the West Germanic languages, but Old Norse had
<-r>, which developed from earlier <-az> (preserved in Old Runic
inscriptions).
The form of Finnish <kuningas> is
more primitive than the expected Gothic *kunings. In is also very different from
ON konungr. The most likely source would be Proto-Germanic itself. There are
other Germanic borrowings in Finnish that look equally archaic, e.g.
<renkas> 'ring, loop' < *xrengaz (a form so old that it does not
reflect the common Germanic shift of *-en- to *-in-).
Slavic *kUnINg-U may have been borrowed
from Gothic (*kuning-s) or from some very early form of West Germanic (*kuning).
The *kuning- part is faithfully preserved in either case, but unlike the
Finns, who did not analyse the loan morphologically, the
Slavs replaced the Germanic inflectional ending (if any) with their own
*-U.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 9:31 PM
Subject: [tied] *kuningaz (again)
I'm trying to focus on a time frame for the
transformation
of this proto-Germanic form (and others
like it i.e. -az endings) into what
existed in
subsequent Germanic languages and dialects. I've
started to go
through Heyne's Gothic Dictionary and
noticed a number of words ending in -s.
Could some of
them have been Gothic developments of -az? (While
other
languages just dropped -az altogether). This may
be a will o' the wisp, but
the reason for my interest
is an attempt to discover broad (or narrow if at
all
possible) parameters for the borrowing of "kuningaz"
by Finns, Balts,
and Slavs. Any notions?*****