Re: [tied] Origin of Proto-Germanic Distinguishing Features

17-12-03 22:15, darth.caton@... wrote:

> The putative difference between Germanic and the rest of IE as
> related to vocabulary is the subject of the thread that brought me to
> this discussion group in the first place. Whether or not we accept
> 30% as the number of non-IE words in some subset of Germanic, it
> stands that there are an anomalously large number of words that are
> not IE, and I think most would agree, a larger number than in other
> branches. I say this because I saw Piotr's claim to the contrary,
> but have seen no lists of such words for, say, Slavic or Greek or
> Italic. (I exclude Indic because there are a lot of non-IE words,
> but we know where those came from, i.e. Dravidian).

Greek (not to mention Armenian or Hittite) is notorious for having
cartloads of etymologically obscure words. There's a large literature
about that. It easily beats Germanic. I suppose a list made for Italic
(or for Celtic, for that matter) would be quite impressive. I can't
promise to compile a list for Slavic, but there are many words described
as "ohne Etymologie" or "fraglich" in dictionaries. Take such common
terms as *pIsU 'dog' and *konjI 'horse', (*k^wo:n and *h1ek^wos are
missing completely despite being attested in Baltic!); there are also
many lexemes shared with Baltic but not the rest of IE.

> But vocabulary is not the only difference between the Germanic branch
> and the other branches. Germanic languages are well-known for
> exhibiting certain notable odd characteristics. One of them is the
> Germanic languages' much greater tendency to agglutination, relative
> to most other IE languages (though this feature has appeared in rare
> cases elsewhere in individual languages). Another more infamous one
> is Germanic's preservation of IE ablaut, which happened because
> stress in Germanic moved to the initial syllable.

???

...

> Shield (Swedish sköld, Finnish suojavaippa)
> Bite (Swedish bita, Finnish pistos/pistaa)
> Keel (Swedish köl, Finnish köli)
> Oar (Swedish åra, Finnish airo)
> Rudder (Swedish styre, Finnish ruori)
> Rider, knight (Swedish riddare, Finnish rittari) (almost def.
> borrowing from Norse)
> Mast (Swedish masto, Finnish masto)
> king (Swedish konung, kung, Finnish kuningas)
> carp (Swedish karp, Finnish karppi)
> lamb (Swedish lamm, Finnish lammas)
> folk (Swedish volk, Finnish väki)

Some of these English words (<bite>, <rudder>, <mast>, <king>, <folk>)
have certain (the first two, at the very least) or plausible IE
etymologies. Some of the Finnish words are of course Germanic borrowings
(<kuningas> and <lammas> even retain their PGmc. inflections
(*kuninga-z, *lambaz-). Some of the "matches" are false (<bit-> :
<pist->, <folk> : <väki>; but Fin. kansa 'people' is a loan from
Germanic). The 'carp' term is a wanderwort that has been borrowed to and
fro throughout Northern Europe. Its ultimate source has not been
identified, but it was borrowed into Germanic after Grimm's Law. On the
whole, whereas the various layers of loans _into_ Finnish and Sámi (from
Common Germanic, Proto-Norse, Old Norse and the individual Scandinavian
languages) are well-known and easy to identify, I'm not aware of
indisputably Finnic (let alone Proto-Finno-Ugric) loans into Proto-Germanic.

Piotr