On 2008-04-17 15:51, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
> ALL THESE WERE LATINIZED changing an o- in the middle with an a- ?
>
> SO PLEASE BE SERIOUS HERE....
I am dead serious. Don't misrepresent what I said. And what I said was
that _Germanic_ compounds were given a linking -o- in the process of
Latinisation. Why? _Precisely_ because the Romans were closely
acquainted with the X-o-Y compound structure they knew well mostly from
Greek and Celtic (those languages preserved old compositional *-o-,
which had become *-a- in Proto-Germanic). You can't seriously claim that
there's anything diagnostically un-Germanic about <Marco-> in
<Marco-manni> if <Lango-bardi> (*lanGa-), <Ostro-gothi> (*austra-),
<Theodo-ricus>, <Chlodo-vicus> etc. are 100% Germanic. They were simply
assimilated to a familiar pattern.
Piotr