Re: Møller on *w-r- "guard"

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> wrote:

> > Møller on *w-r "guard"
> >
> > 1 w-r- 'behutsam (sein)' (< voridg. w-r-),
> > ahd. gi-war 'behutsam, vorsichtig',
>
> > Ger. gewahr ("aware" usu. of a danger)
>
> > got. varei 'Behutsamkeit,
> > ags. waru
> > as. ahd. wara 'Acht, Aufmerksamkeit,
> > gr. thuro:rós (kypr. thura-woros) 'Türhüter',
> > as. ward
> > ahd. wart 'Wächter',
> > got. daura-vards 'Tür-hüter',
> > vardja 'Wächter',
> > an. vo,rðr 'Wächter, Wache',
>
> In Ger., Hüter, Wache and Wächter can be replaced by the syn.

Wärter (<

> ahd. wartari). (Also cf. Sternwarte "Observatorium; observatory")
>
> #
>
> If a Semitic loanword, then when could the PIE-speaking people have
> gotten it? As they had Messopotamia as their southern neighborhood?
> (Are these wVr words also included in the vocabularies of the
> Iranic-Indic branch?)
>

I think if they were, Møller would have quoted it, which he does of
other roots. That's the interesting thing, the Semitic-looking words
appear mainly in Germanic. This is the basis for Vennemann's proposal
of a Semitic (I think AfroAsiatic) language spoken in Western Europe
which he calls Atlantic and from which substrate Germanic (or one of
its predecessors, later passng on the loan etc) would have taken over
those words when it arrived in Europe.

On the other hand, if you would take some medieval chroniclers
seriously, there was an Assyrian invasion of Germany once. Who knows
what garbled information is in that.

I left out some of Møller's Semitisch-Indogermanisch cognates (as he
saw them) on *w-r- meaning "growth, garden", but who knows if that
might have been the object of the protecting?


Torsten