From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 13719
Date: 2002-05-14
----- Original Message -----From: x99lynx@...Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 10:10 PMSubject: [tied] Re: "Irmin" and Hermes> All of this points in the exact opposite direction. It says that it was not the Romans who were so thoroughly familiar with Germanic suffixes, but rather that the Germanics were so thoroughly familiar with Latin. It is only the conceit of 19th century northern European scholars that has the Romans being scrupulous with Germanic roots and suffixes. It is most likely it was the other way around.I am not claiming that any Romans were fluent in Germanic. All I'm saying is that they were able to Latinise Germanic tribal names by converting them into Latin plurals. You don't have to be a polyglot to do that. One *xattaz, many *xatto:z become Chattus, Chatti. Regular plural into regular plural. Some of the Germanic endings were so similar to their Latin counterparts (e.g. Germanic *-o:, pl. *-o:niz vs. Latin -o:, -o:nes) that even the most moronic Romans were sure to understand their function without having to learn the language.
> If anybody it was Germanic speakers who knew *o:z was genitive plural and how that should translate into Latin.Nominative plural, actually. The Romans didn't have to know the Germanic oblique cases.> And also it was probably Germanic speakers who made sure the -h- was there when they spoke words like Hermunduri and Hermiones, just as those words appear in Tacitus.Since you mention that, the "ermVn-" names are _never_ attested with an initial consonant in _any_ Germanic language. OE eormen-, ON jörmun-, OHG/OS irmin-/irman-. It's only the Latin-language sources that show the <h->. If you claim that the Germani knew better than anyone else when they an aitch was needed in their language, I agree.> And that also would apply to the -h- in Boihaemi, as well as Tacitus' Harios, Helveconas, Helisios and Nahanarvalos -- "the most powerful of the Lugii." (Note also that Tacitus apparently DID NOT "automatically" substitute -i for the <os> in some of
these names.) And of course Tacitus did not use the -h- in such names as Arminius, Aravisci or Arsacis, Eborium, Ernagium, Asciburgus, etc.Pardon me, Steve, but do you know any Latin at all? I mean the sort of knowledge that allows you to recognise a regular grammatical form. Harios is the _LATIN_ acc.pl., justified by the syntax of the sentence in which it occurs. The corresponding nom.pl. is Harii, with an -i. The same is true of the other names above -- they have the automatically substituted Latin endings, just as I said.As regards the aspirate, *x- was lenited in the eastern dialects earlier than it was in West Germanic. The <h-> in the names of the Harii (*xarja-) or the Hasdingi (*xazdinga-) reflects the same Germanic consonant as the <ch-> in Cherusci or Chatti. The Romans used <h-> for the glottal glide of those languages that had it. The Franks preserved a velar fricative especially long; they had names with <Chari-> or <Chlod-> well into the Middle Ages, when other folks were already <Here-> or <Lud->. The Hermunduri belonged to the <ch-> block in middle Germania: Tacitus himself explicitly classifies them together with the Suebi, Chatti and Cherusci.
> Please. The fact that the Romans of this time wrote <hermes> and never *<chermes> or *<ermes> proves what?That educated Romans knew enough Greek to avoid such spelling mistakes. You know when to write <-gh-> in an English word, don't you, though it hasn't been pronounced for half a millennium, and you know when to write <pt-> in a word of Greek origin even if you pronounce it as [t-].> And what evidence do you know of that the Roman -h- was mute in the 1st Centuries BC-AD?I've already written to Cybalist about that:> And why in the world would the "Romans" start off using an -h- in a German word when they were quite capable of starting words - lots of words - with <er->?The folk-etymological association of Ermun/Ermin- with Hermes is quite a reasonable explanation.
> Where is this epithet? Where does one go to see it? If the Romans heard <hermon> (-guda?), they would have thought it was a Greek-style pillar dedicating the area to a local god or to Terminus or one of those hybrid hermae - like <Hermathene>. I think it would have been up to the Germans to explain that *ermVna was a native god, which of course they never did.Jörmunr < *ermun- is one of Odin's epithets in Scandinavian tradition. If you want to see it, go to this address, for example:The identification of Wodan and Mercury/Hermes is even reflected in the calque <Mercurii dies> --> Wednesday, Woensdag, etc.Piotr