From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 13665
Date: 2002-05-09
----- Original Message -----From: x99lynx@...Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2002 8:10 AMSubject: [tied] Hermunduri as a Greek Word> 4. Hermo:n + thuro:soi [should be <tHuro:roi> -- PG] = Hermondoroi? Gatekeepers of the southern markets. Porters of the trade roads, across boundaries? (cf. Bastarnae). Or were they <thoras> [??? -- P.G.], followers of the god? (Tacitus tells us the main god of the Germans - at the time - was "Mercury". Gods cross national and linguistic boundaries, as any Christian, Buddhist or Moslem will tell you.)
> Hermo:n + thuro:soi = Hermondoroi? I don't see why this is any less of an explanation than that the word is of Germanic origin. Less self-approving perhaps than "ermena (groß) + dur (wertvoll), duren (fest), turon (kühn)"... or just plain darn "vastly wonderful."Steve,My greatest objection to your "Hermetic porters", beside the formal difficulties discussed below, is that the etymology is arbitrary and neither unparallelled by anything I know in matters of ethnonymy, nor motivated by any real-world historical scenario. Such etymologies are a dime a dozen in books like Bernal's "Black Athene". A Greek phrase (and a rather unlikely one one at that, see below for details) picked up by a band of pre-Germanic speakers and adopted as a self-appellation? Is it in any way superior to Torsten's "Aryamans of Tur"?
As regards the form, the genitive <hermo:n> is of course _plural_ (and Attic, which may be a problem; the gen.sg. is <hermou>, <hermeo:>, <hermeia:o> depending on the dialect), and the meaning of <herme:s> in the dictionary quote you mentioned is "a pillar with a bust on top". Apart from such a special context a phrase like "Hermeses' (pl.!) porters" makes little sense. I also fail to see how you can get from Gk. <tHuro:ro-> to Gmc. *dura- without quite a lot of special argumentation. They are just vaguely similar, which is a thing of little significance in itself. It isn't enough to suggest that "perhaps the word underwent some slight changes and assimilation changes in Germanic". The very purpose of historical phonology is to _constrain_ the set of explanations, so that plausible ones can be told apart from fanciful ones.The things that can be "ermen" in Germanic include at least the following: the earth, a tribe (these two most often, impressionistically), a god, a monster (the Midgard serpent), a town/fort/enclosure, a king, a man, and a column (the pillar of the Universe). Whenever a translation is kindly provided by the scribes (as it often is in OE and occasionally in Old Norse and elsewhere), it's 'immensus' or similar. I'm sure that if you strain your imaginagination you can think of a way to connect Hermes with all these words, which would only prove that it's easy to build a chain of asssociations between any pair of ideas. The known Greek vocabulary is vast, or should I say ermen, so maybe you prefer something sexy like <tHoros> 'semen', for example?A Germanic etymology is better for the simple reason that it's less unusual while being quite satisfactory as etymologies go. One normally expects a Germanic tribe to have a Germanic name, unless there is a really important reason to think otherwise. If the name contains an element that is difficult to etymologise, so be it; rare or obsolete words may still function as ethnonyms (though of course *dur- _may_ be related apophonically to the *diur- root as represented by <dear> and <darling>, just as *gut- _may_ be related to *giut- and *gaut-; the problem is only that there isn't enough data in either case to make the demonstration generally acceptable and the relationship remains conjectural).Piotr