From: tgpedersen
Message: 34579
Date: 2004-10-09
>
> >>> from my failing memory: Britanic place names 'pen-'
> >>> "head" ?
>
> >> The latter is probably a different word - compare Old
> >> Irish _cenn_ 'head'.
>
> > 'Cadraig' type loan?
>
> You mean <Cothriche>?
>
> There's an Ogam QENILOCAGNI (gen.), whence OIr <Cennlachán>
> (nom.) (later <Cellachán>), that apparently contains the
> 'head' word; don't know offhand how early it is.
>
> Brian
>
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Joao" <josimo70@...> wrote:
> http://www.ceantar.org/Dicts/MB2/mb07.html
>
>
> ceann
> head, so Irish, Old Irish cend, cenn, Welsh, Breton penn, Gaul,
Penno-, *qenno. Perhaps for qen-no-, root qen (labialised), begin,
Church Slavonic koni, beginning, as in ceud, first. The difficulty is
that the other labialising languages and the Britonic branch
otherwise show no trace of labialisation for qen. Windisch, followed
by Brugmann, suggested a stem kvindo-, Indo-European root kvi,
Sanskrit çvi, swell, Greek @GPíndos, Pindus Mount; but the root vowel
is not i, even granting the possible labialisation of kvi, which does
not really take place in Greek. Hence ceannag, a bottle of hay,
ceannaich, buy (="heading" or reckoning by the head; cf. Dial. ceann,
sum up), ceannaich, head-wind ( Hend.), ceannas, vaunting ( Hend.).
>
It's even worse than that, considering all the 'can' "jar, pitcher"
words in Germanic. This particular word seems to transcend the
traditional kW/p boundaries in Celtic, in which behaviour it is
reminiscent of the *pad- "flat land" root, cf.
"
"The word was earlier pett; it meant a parcel of land or
farmland ...; and it is a PCeltic word, related to
peth "thing" Welsh
pez "piece" Breton
*petia > Gaulish
pièce "piece" French
and more distantly to
cuid "portion" Gaelic
The Gaulish word, borrowed into Vulgar Latin in France, occurs
in legal documents in the phrase
petia terrae "a parcel of land"
exactly in the sense of our pett."
"
"
*gW(î|â)d- "land" Proto-Afrasian
*gûd- "land, country" Cushitic
*gW(i|u)d- "place" Chadic
*gad- "earth" Omotic
"
from
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/pd.html
and, if the *pad- "low-lying land" is somehow related to *apa-
"water, river", one can relate the alternation to the kW/p of
*akWa/*apa. That would explain the kW/p alternation as caused by
loans from different non-IE sources.
Torsten