--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> > Ario- (< *Hario- according to Pokorny p. 67) is most likely from
> > Germanic *harjaz 'army'.
>
> 'Most likely' because?
One good reason would be that we have no other Germanic personal
names with *arja-, but a whole lot with *harja-, and we know that the
Romans weren't particular sensitive to the opposition ''h-'' ~ ''-''.
On the other hand, since the second part of the name is not testified
in later Germanic onomastics, we should perhaps not expect that the
first part should.
The ideological argument is of course irrelevant from the point of
view of etymology, even though one should always take care that one's
research is not potentially abusable. At any rate, even if Ario- is
related to arya-, it wouldn't mean that Ariovist was an Aryan in any
sense of that word; he was just a Swabian behaving very badly.
Furthermore, even though *harja-wistaz looks very attractive - both
ideologically and etymologically, there are two phonological
objections that need good answers first:
1. I am not sure that the Germanic ''h'' was so soft already that
Caesar would have ignored it; the weakness of the Latin ''h'' would
have caused the Romans to hear a ''k'' or a Greek aspirated ''kh''
instead - like in Cimbri and Charudes.
2. The second part cannot be derived from *ueid-to-, as suggested in
the Wikipedia article; this form would give *wīsaz in Germanic.
By the way, wise is normally reconstructed *ueid-s-o-. One might
suppose an early Germanic *wītsaz (recorded as -vistus in
Latin). On the other hand, one would prefer that tt and ts went along
in Germanic, and since both Italic and Celtic also have ss for tt,
this sound change probably goes back to the 2nd millennium at least.
If we accept Ø=h, another possibily would be a compound with
something like *wiðu- "tree" (like in the name Ar(n)vid) or *waiþa-
"hunt, journey". Or *werðu- "host". It is at least conceivable that
a Roman informant would render a Germanic [þ] with his own [st]. If
one is ready to believe that the Suebi were already pronouncing
their /t/ as [ts], *hwītaz "white" would also be within our
reach.
Well, let's not get desperate. The problem with names is that we have
no indication of the original semantics, and therefore practically
anything goes.
George