marks

From: tgpedersen
Message: 13965
Date: 2002-07-04

> But come to think of it, the Avestan word I should have been
thinking
> of was <fs^umans-> "having much cattle" (<- PIE *peku-), which
would
> tempt (pre-proto-Germanic) camp followers to say (proto-Germanic)
> *fehu- (I know of course p->f is restricted to some enviroments in
> Iranian etc etc).
>
> Torsten

Some more ideas (can't help myself):

Someone once claimed that the concept of "mark" was a common
Germanic idea, the actual manifestations of which were the American
Frontier, the Irish Pale, the Ostmark and Mark Brandenburg against
the Slavs etc; the area-which-is-about-to-become-ours (and normal
laws don't apply). In which case the name Marcomanni is apt around 0
CE since they just colonized Bohemia (*Boio-haim-, get it?) away from
the Celtic Boii. And if they were the same colonizers that colonized
Denmark, that would explain the occurrence of -mark in that latter
name, which always puzzled me: a <-mark>, a frontier, smack dab in
the middle of Germanic-speaking territory?
Now we know who were the colonizers, who were the colonized? Going by
the words <Finn-mark>, <Lap-mark>, in which the name of the colonized
is the first member of the compound, I'd say the colonized were the
Danes (but I'm open to suggestions!), a collective terms for those
(Celtic?) tribes that had invaded the area 500 years earlier, since
the came from Tanais(?).

Torsten