Re: Romance brother

> > > > I thought something like this: the Germani might have called
> > > > themselves Ermani (< Iranian *aryaman), cf. Alemanni,
> > > > Arminius...
> >
> > It's an idea I've been pushing for some years now: Germanic was a
> > lingua franca that was born of the meeting between an Iranian
> > people and some local folk in what is now southeastern Poland, the
> > peoples known from history as Sciri and Bastarnae, and that that
> > language spread westward from there. The archives are full of it.
>
> I've checked in the archives and I found that Piotr has
> deconstructed

Does that mean "disproved"?

> your hypothesis more than once in a convincing manner.

I wasn't convinced, obviously.

> The best select quote from Piotr's messages in those threads is,
> IMHO, the following one:
>
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/13665
> "A Germanic etymology is better for the simple reason that it's less
> unusual while being quite satisfactory as etymologies go. One
> normally expects a Germanic tribe to have a Germanic name, unless
> there is a really important reason to think otherwise."

Both you and Piotr think the theory you are implicitly advocating is a
null hypothesis. It isn't. There are more problems, linguistic and
archeological, with assuming that the Germanic proto-language is
bodenständig, autochthonous in Germania, than there is with my
version. For instance what occasioned it to split up into branches
2000 years ago, if it had existed undivided in the same wide
geographical area, from Scandinavia to Thuringia, for several hundred
years? Why had nobody heard of the Germani, nor of any of their
tribes, before Julius Caesar? Why did the tribes on the Rhine worship
Matrones? Why did the Marsi, supposedly Germanic, have a temple for a
goddess Tamfana, and what did she have to do with the Germanic
pantheon? Why does Tacitus call the Germani newcomers if they're not?
Why does every Greek and Roman chronicler before that time call the
people in those parts Celto-Scythian if they're not? If we admit on
linguistic ground that the NWBlock area between Weser/Aller and
Somme/Oise were colonized and made Germanic-speaking at that time, how
do we know that something similar hadn't happened in the rest of
Germania?

Specifically on the etymology: The Hermunduri were later called
Thuringi. Already the Grimm brothers saw the common -dur/tur- in those
names. Hermunduri can be read as an Iranian erman-dur "followers of
Tur", which is in Germanic Þur-ing- (Turanians?). They can be
identified with the Tungri which were the first 'Germani' Caesar met.

> Also, one should bear in mind that a consensus has emerged among
> Indo-Europeanists in recent years, that the Proto-Indo-Iranian terms
> *ari-, *arya-/a:rya- and derivatives have no reflexes in other
> branches of IE.

Are you sure Ariovist knew that?


Torsten