Re: Torun´

From: tgpedersen
Message: 13923
Date: 2002-06-25

--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
> What is the etymology of name of the Polish city of Torun´
(German
> Thurn?)? It's not on the Orbis Latinus list
>
> Torsten the vain
>
> The oldest known version of the name (13th c.) is Thorun
(occasional variants: Thuron, Thrun = Latinised Thorunium in Orbis
Latinus -- it is there!). It was at that time that the Teutonic
Knights built a castle and established a town that replaced an
already existing Slavic village. Unfortunately, we don't know what
the village had been called previously, hence the long-standing (and
once politically charged) dispute about the origin of the name. I
think a German origin is more likely after all, given the general
place-naming tendencies of the Knights, who did not normally retain
or adapt local Slavic or Baltic names, but in that case it dates back
only to ca. 1231. Some say it was given after one of the Order's
forts in the Holy Land, but I haven't been able to verify that.
>
> Piotr
>
>
So it is! I kept looking for 'Thurn', not 'Thorn'. Given German
<Turm>, Dutch <toren> (Da. <tårn>) I was surprised to learn that the
knights spoke platt.

As you might have surmised, I was fishing for another Tur- name.

Here is a maybe inconsequential, but anyway, map of Düring's etc in
Flanders.

http://www.duerinck.com/duermap.html

The town of Tongeren is just to the northwest of Liege. If "Düring"
etc in this case means "Thuringian", when did they arrive? Perhaps
already back at the collapse of Thuringia in 531, expecting a
friendly welcome by old emigrés?

http://froebelweb.tripod.com/thuringia/history.html

In which case we would have an interesting contrast between the t- of
Tongeren (named from the Tungri, which people Tacitus implicitly
calls the first Germani) and d- (< þ-) of Düring. Might we infer
something about the timing of the first Germanic sound shift (Grimm),
ie. between 50 BCE and 531 CE? Of course the Tungri might have been
Celticized after having been defeated, and þ- > t- is known eg. from
the continental Scandinavian languages. But on the other hand no
Roman author writes **Thungri?

But if we accept this as valid argument, then there's the -d- of
Hermunduri, which, if from <tu:r>, is affected by Verner. But wasn't
there a suggestion once that Verner came before Grimm, ie in this
case first -t- > -d- (and then, by Grimm > -ð-)?

Torsten