Re: [tied] Re: DATING WEDNESDAY?/BACKING UP CYBALIST

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 17897
Date: 2003-01-21

----- Original Message -----
From: <x99lynx@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 10:11 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: DATING WEDNESDAY?/BACKING UP CYBALIST


> Do you have a guess at when OE <wodan>, OHG <woutan> and whatever
proto-Scandinavian form (did it already have that curled d in it?) were all one word? Do we go back as far as Proto-Germanic or rather probably proto-NW Germanic (since no Gothic)? Or is there something else involved? Like are all the sound changes the basic ones or are there later ones? Around what date would you put that at? (I know you've done this in the past, but Yahoo won't let me retrieve it.)

I'm not sure I've done it in the past. We don't know the Gothic name of Wodan/Odin (if there was one). It would have been *wo:dans in Wulfilan Gothic (the related adjective <wo:þs, wo:d-> 'mad, possessed' was there). For that reason, the reconstruction *wo:danaz (~ *wo:dinaz) counts as NWGermanic, but the hypothetical Proto-Germanic form would have been the same. All the known forms of the name derive regularly from that protoform, which means that the historically accumulated differences evaporate as we move back towards common NW Germanic. AD 200-300 seems to be a reasonable estimate of the end of that unity, which doesn't mean that the various "Wodan" words became different overnight.

What we write *d in Proto-Germanic reconstructions was actually realised as a voiced fricative [ð] in most contexts. It remained fricative or was "hardened" into a stop depending on the language and the phonetic context. Whether you transcribe the Proto-Scandinavian form as *wo:danaz or *wo:ðanaz doesn't really matter, since the difference was non-phonemic (for a close analogy, compare the pronunciation of /d/ in Modern Spanish).


> RE: BACKING UP CYBALIST

> Piotr, do they give you actual access to the archives files in any way? Do they give you a code word that lets you onto their server for administrative reasons? Is there any mention of an ftp address?

No such facilities here, which is a ******* shame . My access is as limited as yours. I don't even enjoy all the moderatorial rights: some of them are reserved for our absent list owner. For one thing, there's this "indoeuropean" link on the front page, the URL having been appropriated by cybersquatters from the porn trade.

> Also, you know on the old IE list Alderson got them to put everything on the The Linguist lists, which has a really good search engine and also permitted the moderator to download a complete copy.

Perhaps we should move the list to a more member-friendly club one day.

Piotr