Re: [tied] Enclosed Places

----- Original Message -----
From: "alex" <alxmoeller@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 7:10 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Enclosed Places (was: The unexplained link between
Greek/Latin and Tamil)


> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "alex" <alxmoeller@...>
> > To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> > Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2003 11:29 PM
> > Subject: Re: [tied] Enclosed Places (was: The unexplained link between
> > Greek/Latin and Tamil)
> >
> >
> >> Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
> >>> 12-07-03 23:44, alex wrote:
> >
> >>>> If there is in Slavic the meaning "fence" then it can be a loan
> >>>> from Slavic. If not, then it is not.
> >
> > Zero-grade forms seem to imply such a sense. Unfortunately, my German
> > dictionary's not good enough for me to fuly understand Pokorny's
> > statement, "tiefstuf. slav. z^ürdü in aksl. z^rüdü `Holz', russ.
> > z^erdü `lange, du"nne Stange', poln. z`erdz/, sloven. z^r^d
> > `Wiesbaum'". Baltic does have a fence word, "lit. [...] gardìs f.
> > `Gatter, Gitter'", meaning open fencework as in railings or a trellis.
>
> I guess Pokorny make here a reference vis a vis Phyrigian forms where we
> find the unpalatalised "g" but too the "z" there. This is why the Slavic
> forms with "z" are analysed too. For the slavic parts with the meaning
> "holz, wiesbaum, dünne Stange", I would complete here with "jordie" or
> "joardã" (dünne Stange), but even if DEX compare it with Slavic z^rUdi,
> DEX considere the Rom. word as a loan from Hungarian "zsorda".
> Now, speaking about the zero grade of the PIE root means we cannot speak
> about Slavic here for the form with "gradU" and the meaning for fence.

I only reported on the words Pokorny derives from PIE *gHerdH- and its
ablaut variants. Piotr supports the alternative interpretation that there
was no *gHerdH, only *g^HerdH, and that the forms in Satem languages that
indicate *gH arise from borrowing, ultimately from Germanic.

How far back we can push the loan into Balto-Slavonic? Presumably it could
go back to before the break-up of Satem. In which case, could the Albanian
form _garth_ 'hedge' be inherited from Common Satem? Pokorny does propose
Indo-Iranian cognates, viz. Sanskrit gr.ha- 'house' and Avestan g&r&a- m.
'cave (as some sort of dwelling)'. Moreover, I don't recall anyone
contradicting Sergei when he said, Albanian _garth_ is a native word (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/14192 ). Is there any reason
that this (or its Dacian cognate) need not be the source of the Romanian
word?

I did not quote the Slavic forms in /z/ (derived by inheritance from
*g^HerdH); I quoted forms in /z^/. Alternations of /g/ and /z^/ occur in
Slavic morphemes to this day.

At what point did vowel gradation cease to be productive in Slavic? Or is
it still productive today? (In English, it survives only in verb
paradigms.) The question I want to ask is, 'Do Proto-Slavic *gardU and
*z^rdU have the same morpheme?', but I'm not sure whether that is
answerable.
>
> >
> >>> Wrong (see above), also because there might have been a
> >>> specialisation of meaning in _Slavic_ after the word had been
> >>> borrowed into Albanian and Romanian. (The meaning of Germanic
> >>> *gardaz was also fairly general, but has become narrowed down in
> >>> Modern English <yard>).
> >>
> >> Hard. In both languages the word specialised itself in the same way.
> >
> > Well, for comparison there's always Old English _tu:n_ 'enclosure,
> > garden, yard; building(s) on a piece of enclosed land, farmstead;
> > cluster of buildings or houses', from which we get English 'town' and
>
> > the common suffix '-ton' in English place names. Cognate with that,
> > we have Dutch _tuin_ 'garden', German _Zaun_ 'fence, hedge', OIr
> > du:n, Welsh din 'fort, castle, fortified place', seen in Celtic place
> > names such as London, Lyons and the alternative name, Dunedin, of
> > Edinburgh.
>
> I fail to see your comparative point here.

After Gothic, the earliest and best documented Germanic language is Old
English, and there is no trace of the 'hedge' meaning in recorded OE, but
yet the 'hedge' meaning is what we find in German 'Zaun'. Thus the survival
(or creation) of the meaning 'fence' should not be so surprising.

Richard.