Re: HRIM

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Gordon Barlow" <barlow@...> wrote:

> >> What's the etymology of Norse Hrim "ice, frost" ?
> >> Joao SL
> ********
> > Hrim in Old English also (rime in Mod. Eng.). No etymology given
> >in the references I have handy.
> >Dan Milton
>
> If Joao and Dan don't mind reading the speculations of an amateur,

on this

> occasion... Fools rush in where the angels have feared to tread,

and all

> that...
>
> I see the root of "hrim" as being h+vowel+r, with -m as a suffix.

"Hrim"

> then appears to be a close cognate of English "hoar", and of English

"grey".

>
> The Oxford Etymological Dictionary suggests slightly different IE

words for

> "hoar" and "grey" - *koir and *ghregh respectively - but I think the
> compilers might have been a wee bit too cautious there. Are today's
> etymologists readier to merge the two roots?

Less ready, I would have thought!

> I have read that the (re-)
> constructors of PIE posit *wos as a colours-suffix; the O Et D offers
> *ghreghwos as the origin of "grey", for instance.

*ghre:ghwos, actually. Length matters.

Well, the -w- seems

> gratuitous, but an -os attachment has probably come down to us in

English

> as -ish - among many variants, of course.

Note that the OEtD refers to the suffix as -wo-. The -s is simply the
nominative singular masculine ending (as in Latin, Greek, Lithuanian,
etc.) Did you look at the cognates? You might have noted the Middle
Dutch _grau_ and OHG _gra:o_. If you'd pursued your researches and
looked at Pokorny (Root #657, *g'her no. 3), e.g. at
http://www.ieed.nl/cgi-bin/response.cgi?flags=eygtnrl&single=1&base\
name=/data/ie/pokorny&text_recno=657&root=leiden ...

(If this URL doesn't work, note that I've split the word 'basename';
I've put up an English-language index at
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.wordingham/pok/pok_index.htm .)

... you would have seen that the g.s. of the OHG form is _gra:wes_,
showing that the *w is far from gratuitous. (I see Brian Scott's made
the same point using the plural.) In fact, Pokorny reconstructs
*g^hre:w(i)os, so it may be the *gH that is gratuitous!

> Thus, *ghregh(w)os might have
> meant "grey-ish". That would have been more accurate and logical: -ish
> makes for a much more defensible range of colours. Many other English
> colours' names seem to have similar and similarly-disguised "-ish"-type
> suffixes.

Except that the suffix is -wo-, that seems fair enough. English -ish
derives from *-iskos.

> If my basic premise is correct (and it may be, despite its

provenance), then

> the -im suffix is a puzzle. To be consistent I must claim it as

adjectival,

> like -ish. Vowel+m is an uncommon suffix in English; is it common

in any of

> the IE-derived languages?

There're deverbal noun suffixes *-mo-s (as in Greek -ismos > English
-ism) and -men- (yielding Old English -ma, and Russian neuter nouns in
-m'a), and I assume we're seeing one of them in the Latvian _kreims_
cited by Petusek.

Richard.