Re: [tied] Enclosed Places

----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Enclosed Places


> 13-07-03 13:23, Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I wouldn't die for this hypothesis, but it is certainly worth exploring.
> The "garden" etymon is a very messy affair.
>
> > How far back we can push the loan into Balto-Slavonic? Presumably it
could
> > go back to before the break-up of Satem.
>
> It depends on what how we analyse the Germanic word. If *gardaz <
> *g^HordHo-, the loan could be very old. If < *g^Hor-tó- (cf. Lat.
> hortus, Celtic *gorto-), it would have to be post-Vernerian, and
> borrowed either independently into Baltic and Slavic, or into Baltic via
> Slavic. This would mean that Lat. urbs, Phryg. gordo- (for which the
> meaning 'city' is more or less conjectural), not to mention Skt. gr.ha-,
> may not be closely related to *gardaz and perhaps we should start
> looking for alternative etymologies.

Latin urbs is already quite messy - two precedented irregularites, not to
mention a different declension.

> > 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 ).
>
> Opinions vary. Cimochowski, who did not hesitate to treat <daltë> as a
> loan from Slavic, wrote that <gardh> was "incontestablement hérité". But
> he was merely echoing Jokl's opinion, and did not offer any arguments of
> his own. What worries me is that I can't see how one could prove that
> <gardh> is inherited (as would be the case if we had a Satem reflex in
> Albanian). If we reconstruct the PIE word as *g^Hor-to- rather than
> *g(^)HordHo-, we are _forced_ to assume a Germanic "diffusion centre"
> from which the word spread across half of Europe.
>
> > Is there any reason
> > that this (or its Dacian cognate) need not be the source of the Romanian
> > word?
>
> See above.

I take it that that means that it could be.

> > 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?
>
> No longer productive in roots, though the alternations are still pretty
> transparent. As for the consonants, the alternation *g/*z^ was still
> alive at the time of early borrowing from Germanic. In some loans we see
> velars palatalised before front vowels according to the pattern of the
> "first palatalisation" (i.e. *g > *z^ rather than *dz), e.g. *z^elsti
> (*z^eld-) 'pay a fine, compensate' < *geld-an- (Eng. yield,
Goth. -gildan).
>
> > (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.
>
> To be precise, they are *gordU and *z^IrdI.

Is this /Ir/ the soft syllabic [r] you've spoken of?

I had a browser problem here. My browser is displaying soft yers as u
umlaut, so I mistook them for hard yers. I get a different glyph (a small
rectangle that is narrow eough to look like an undotted 'i') if I change
font.

> A similar question can be
> asked of Germanic: are Eng. <yard>1 'court' and <yard>2 'stick, rod'
> related or not?

As a native speaker, I don't feel any connection between the 2 <yard> words.

> If one follows Pokorny and lumps the the latter with
> Goth. gazds and ON gaddr, then it must derive from *gazdjo: (with WGmc.
> rhotacism) and has nothing to do with *gardaz. On the other hand, one
> would like to relate <yard>2 to Slavic *z^IrdI (the meaning is
> practically the same). I can't think of a satisfying solution at the
> moment. I hope you can see what I mean by "a messy affair".

Could be contamination! Is Slavic *z^IrdI a unit of measurement (or at
least a measuring rod?). I look up Russian <zherd'> and get 'perch, pole'.
I look these words up, and find 5m (5.0292m to be pedantic) for both of
them.


Is there a ploughing connection? 4 poles = 1 chain, 10 chains = 1 furlong ,
an acre is a chain by a furlong (literally 'furrow length'). I can't
remember how much one was expected to plough in a day.

> > 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.
>
> Note that although <town> means 'town' and nothing else in Modern
> English, the dialectal verb <tine, tyne> (Kentish <teen>) < OE ty:nian <
> *tu:n-jan- was found with the meaning 'enclose with a hedge or fence' as
> late as the 19th century (see the OED entry). This is a very close
> parallel to Slavic *gordU vs. *gorditi.


And it lurks on in Chambers' Twentieth Century Dictionary, where they quote
OE ty:nan, which I presume is what you meant.

Richard.