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

At 4:15:15 PM on Wednesday, December 17, 2003,
darth.caton@... wrote:

> 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.

Mallory mentions that a cursory examination of Greek
vocabulary by Anna Morpurgo Davies found that less than 40%
of the lexicon had transparent IE etymologies, 8% had
established non-Greek origins, and about 52% had no clear
etymologies.

> 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).

Could you give some examples of what you mean? Germanic
compounding is familiar enough, but agglutination?

> In short, what I am proposing is that proto-Germanic,
> during the time its speakers lived only in Scandinavia,
> experienced areal effects from its Finno-Ugric neighbor
> (s) and in so doing developed the unique characteristics
> we know as Germanic today.

> The strongest linguistic evidence for my theory comes from
> these grammatical similarities. Despite those, one weak
> spot the theory has is that of the supposedly non-IE
> words, only a third of them (by my count of one
> abbreviated list) have similarities to Finnish, and some
> of these are obvious borrowings from Norse into Finnish.
> (Cognates listed at end of message).

The list has some problems even to my untutored eye, and I
know almost nothing about Finnish.

> Shield (Swedish sköld, Finnish suojavaippa)

It's not clear to me that the Finnish word has any
connection with the Swedish, but the latter has an
impeccable IE pedigree, from *(s)kel- 'to cut'.

> Bite (Swedish bita, Finnish pistos/pistaa)

The Gmc. word again has a good IE pedigree, from *bheid- 'to
split'.

> Keel (Swedish köl, Finnish köli)

The Finnish looks like a late borrowing from Swedish; the ON
is <kjöll>, from PScand. *kialuR < PGmc. *keluz. This last
has been connected with PIE *gWelh1- 'to swallow', though
I'm not sure of the semantics involved; the suggestion that
I've seen is 'swallow' > 'throat' > 'object bent at one
end'.

> Oar (Swedish åra, Finnish airo)
> Rudder (Swedish styre, Finnish ruori)

Another one with a good IE pedigree: <rudder> is from PIE
*h1erh1- 'to row' and a suffix *-tro- forming nouns of
instrument.

> Rider, knight (Swedish riddare, Finnish rittari) (almost
> def. borrowing from Norse)

The Scand. word is a borrowing from Middle Low German, and
I've no doubt that the Finnish word is also a late
borrowing.

> Mast (Swedish masto, Finnish masto)

I believe that the Swedish word is a borrowing from MLG, in
which case the Finnish is presumably a late borrowing as
well.

> king (Swedish konung, kung, Finnish kuningas)

The Finnish is clearly a borrowing of something very close
to PGmc. *kuningaz.

> carp (Swedish karp, Finnish karppi)
> lamb (Swedish lamm, Finnish lammas)
> folk (Swedish volk, Finnish väki)

The Gmc. word is usually assigned to PIE *pelh1- 'full', I
believe, and according to de Vries has been borrowed into
Finnish as <hulk> 'crowd'.

Brian