Sea

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 29-02-2004 20:42, jpisc98357@... wrote:
>
> [Piotr:]
>
> >> <morass> is ultimately the same word as <marsh>. Both reflect

PGmc.

> >> *mariska- <*morisko-, a derivative of *mori-. OE mer(i)sc and

Mod.E

> >> marsh are its straight-line descendants, whereas <morass> is a

loan from

> >> Old French mareis, which itself is a loan from Germanic. A loan
> >> returned, in this case.
>
> [John:]
>
> > Thanks, does the root go back as far as IE or is it a more

modern

> > coincidence or borrowing. The Old French mareis would obviously

come

> > from the Latin mare, sea, and Celtic mer, anything else

interesting?

>
> This OFr. word (> Mod.Fr. marais 'marsh') is a loan (<-- Gmc.
> *mariska-), but Fr. mer 'sea' descends from Lat. mare. They have
> different histories, though they ultimately derive from the same
> pre-Latin and pre-Germanic source.
>
> PCelt. *mori- 'sea' can only reflect pre-Celtic *mori-, not *mari-,
> though either prototype would be compatible with the Germanic words
> (also Old English mere 'sea, lake, pond' and OHG mari 'sea' < PGmc.
> *mari-, etc.) and with Slavic *morje 'sea' (since in both Germanic

and

> Slavic PIE *a and *o fell together). *mori-, however, is hard to
> reconcile with Lat. mare (Latin, like Celtic, distinguishes the two

vowels).

>
> What we get from these comparisons is the following puzzle: if the

word

> is IE at all, then either PIE had *mari-, and PCelt. *mori- is

aberrant,

> or PIE had *mori- and Lat. mare is aberrant. Perhaps the word was
> borrowed into Italic as *mari- from a language that had merged *a

and *o

> as *a (like Germanic).
>

Are there other cases of *-sk- used to form nouns in Germanic?
If *mariska- was formed in some other IE language (Nordwestblock?),
French might have borrowed the word from that.

Whichever language it was borrowed from, it would have had to be
between the Italic speakers and the sea.

Cf Dutch <meer> 'lake', German <Meer> 'sea', with the non-IE Germanic
German <See> m. 'lake', f. 'sea', and German <Haff> 'lagoon at the
sea', ON <hav> 'sea'. Same lake/sea confusion all over. One gets the
impression that the geography in which the people lived that provided
the non-IE <sea> was one in which it made little sense to distinguish
between 'lake' and 'sea' (because one turned into the other with
great frequency?), Netherlands, perhaps? And that this non-
distinction lake/sea was inherited in the corresponding word of the
IE language (Nordwestblock) that replaced the non-IE coast language.
Or perhaps I'm overinterpreting.

Torsten