A linguist's hint (suspending my scepticism
just a little :)). If *-dura- in Germanic has anything to do with doors or
gates, it must be an indigenous word (not excluding the possibility of a calque,
of course). The IE root noun *dHwor-/*dHur- was moved to less archaic
declensions in the individual Germanic languages, everywhere with the
generalised weak form of the root, *dur-, yielding _all_ the reflexes you quote.
In Gothic we have the regular lowering of *u before /r/, giving /o/ spelt
<au>, in a weak feminine version of the word *dur-o:n-, in OE we have a
secondary feminine u-stem <duru> (*dur-u-) beside the neuter <dor>
from *dur-a-, with the predictable lowering of the *u before the *a of the
second syllable, ON dyrr, OS duri and similar forms in German and Dutch
reflect the old athematic plural *dur-iz, etc., etc., etc. In older Germanic /u/
and short /o/ developed from positional variants of the same PGmc.
phoneme.
Suffice it to say that the forms are
unproblematic, since well-known morphological and phonological processes in
Germanic account for their derivation from *dur- quite satisfactorily. As
regards its form, *-duraz would correspond _exactly_ (as a cognate, not as a
loan) to Greek <-thuros> in compounds. It can't be an occupational term,
though: not "porters" or "gatekeepers" but "having such and such gates" (as in
Gk. ditHuros, Lat. biforis ~ biforus 'having two doors' or athuros 'having
no gate, open'), depending on how we interpret the first part of the compound
(if you want a loan from Greek, <hermo:n> won't do, since the first part
of <X-tHuros> must be the composition form of a stem, not an inflected
word).
Now, a fresh thought: what about those 540
doors of Valhalla in the Norse tradition? (if I remember aright, 800 men
could march in abreast through each of them). Weren't they
ermen?
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2002 8:18 PM
Subject: [tied] Hermunduri as Border Merchants
As far as, matching the vowel with the apparent Germanic -u-
in Hermunduri
and Hermondoroi, all I have is that in Gothic we have attested
<daur>, in ON,
<dyr>, OHG <tor>, and according to OED, OE
had <dor>, <dure>, <dor> and
<dure>, suggesting
multiple sources- all meaning gate or door. I see no
reason to think
that the idea of a closed or open door or gate meaning ACCESS
or lack of it
did not exist in any Germanic mind. It clearly did in Latin
(e.g.,
<dithurus> a seat in the Roman tribunal.)