Re: [tied] tungel, tungel, little star

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 16927
Date: 2002-11-29

--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: vsubrama001
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Saturday, August 17, 2002 11:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [tied] tungel, tungel, little star
>
>
>
> > Dravidian has always been compared to linguistic formations in
Ural-Altaic languages - This might explain similar morph - Tingal
words found in old Swedish and Icelandic, which could be loan words
from a proto-ural/Finnic langauge.
>
> Surely not in the fifth century? And if it was a long time BC, why
didn't Grimm's Law change <t..g..> into <th..k..>? And, in either
event, where can we see this "tingel-tangel" thing in Finno-Ugric (or
in Uralic, or anywhere between India and Scandinavia)?? The Finnish
word for the moon is <kuu>, isn't it? Incidentally, *tungla- is
common Germanic, not exclusively Scandinavian. The meaning 'moon'
(rather than more generally 'celestial body, "star"', as in Gothic
and West Germanic) is restricted to Scandinavian but must be
secondary, since the common Germanic 'moon' word survived there as
well, the difference in Old Norse having been a matter of register.
>
> Piotr

Wider connections of tungl are given, under 'moon', in John
Bengtson's editorial at the end of Issue 31 of the Long Ranger,
www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/MT-31.htm . I can't say the IE
correspondences of Eskimo /t/ given for the 'old' and 'moon' words
fill me with confidence. I hope I've missed something.

Richard.