Re: [tied] *kuningaz

--- Sergejus Tarasovas <S.Tarasovas@...>
wrote:

> I would like to cancel my 'most likely' and change
> it to 'may be'. As
> Piotr wrote,
>
> >Slavic *kUnINg-U may have been borrowed from Gothic
> (*kuning-s)
> >or from some very early form of West Germanic
> >(*kuning).
>
> If your point is to find linguistic arguments
> pointing to the time of
> the borrowing more or less unequivocally, my
> impression is that there
> are no such arguments -- Proto-Germanic, early West
> Germanic or Gothic
> are all equally possible.
> Or what? :)

*****GK: It would depend to some small extent from the
date assigned to the emergence of Slavic as a distinct
IE language family. What's your take on this?*****

>
> The Baltic evidence is controversial, that's why
> some scholars state the
> source was Gothic or even Proto-Germanic, while
> others insist on Middle High German. There are no
> obvious Proto-Germanic
> loans in Baltic in general, and only for two or
> three lexemes
> Proto-Germanic origin is not impossible.

*******GK: What's the view on Latvian "kungs"?*****

*****GK: How late is the Lith. word "kunigaikshtis"?
The senses given "prince, sovereign, grand duke" sound
much closer to East Slavic "knyaz'" than
"kunigas"******

Note,

> however, that _if_
> Lithuanian gu`das '1. Belarusian 2. (dialectal)
> foreigner' is indeed a
> Germanic borrowing, it must reflect pre-Grimm
> Germanic (actually,
> Proto-Germanic) form *gudas, so the borrowing must
> have occured long
> before 0 AD, which could point to rather early
> Balto-Germanic contacts.

*****GK: This is a tricky one. It seems that *gudas in
the sense of "Slav of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania" is
first attested in 1546. Pritsak has a theory that the
word was coined in the 7th-8th c. when the ancestors
of Lithuanians encountered the north-moving Slavs who
had been part of the Gothic realm and kept this term
("Goth") as a self-designation. I find this quite
implausible on historical grounds, and perhaps you
would on linguistic ones. But if *gudas is not a
Germanic borrowing (I find it difficult to imagine
what Germanics would be doing in the area SE of
Lithuania prior to 0 AD), what would be the
alternative?*****

>
> As for Finnish, as Piotr put it,
>
> >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.
>
> Sergei
>

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