Re: [tied] Re: Accepted cognates of Arya?

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

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 2:32 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Accepted cognates of Arya?

> The single /l/ in Alemanni (indicating long a:) puzzles me, since it is traditionally derived from the PGerm. cognate of "all".

 

The single <l> indicates nothing of the kind. The graphemic principle "short vowel, double consonant; long vowel, single consonant" is a relatively recent convention used in several modern Germanic languages, but it doesn't work for early Germanic, where geminates were phonetically real. *alla- < *alna- < *h2al-no-, with assimilation, just as *fulla- < *fulna- < *plh1-no-. A variant without the nasal suffix, *ala-, is also attested in Germanic, e.g. in the common OHG prefix <ala-, ale-, alo-, al-> 'entirely, all-' (<ala-mahti:g>, <ala-wa:r>, etc.). It meant 'whole, true' when prefixed to a noun, as in <ala-namo> 'Hauptname', so it would seem that the somewhat naive interpretation of Alamanni (*ala-manniz) as 'all men' should be corrected to 'real ("whole") men, machos'. Cf. also the Visigothic royal name Alaric (*ala-ri:ks).

 

> One Roman source claims that the Alemanni were Alani, which is denied by linguists, on the Occam principle the entia (concepts) should not be multiplied (they seem to forget the "sine ratione" ie. without reason). Thus in this type of traditional linguistic reasoning, without (linguistic!) evidence to the contrary, a pre-historic people must not be thought to have changed their language (although there are plenty of examples of that in historical times). I think it is a mistake to use such an argumentum ex nihilo if there is extralinguistic evidence present (eg. the testimony of an otherwise reliable chronicler).

 

Who are those "traditional linguists" who deny the possibility of language shift? You erect some men of straw and then knock them down, which is an easy but futile feat. Any historian will tell you that the _equation_ Alamanni = Alani cannot be maintained for extralinguistic reasons. The Alamannic confederation reportedly absorbed a number of originally distinct tribes, quite possibly including some Germanised Iranian marauders. Still, the constitutive ethnic element was certainly Germanic, and so was the name "Alamanni". As a linguist, I can only assure you that the Germanic <ala> in <Alamanni> is etymologically different from the Iranian <ala> in <Alani>, and that the two ethnonyms are unrelated.

 

Piotr