Re: Neigh

At 4:33:59 AM on Saturday, September 20, 2008, tgpedersen
wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 8:13:00 AM on Wednesday, September 17, 2008, Jonathan
>> Morris wrote:

>> [...]

>>> I have a copy of V's book (can I have my money back?)
>>> and was waiting until my time in Purgatory to read it
>>> but was prompted by your query to read the entry on
>>> knife, et al.

>>> It's so transparently bullshit that it hardly deserves
>>> comment - but for the sake of due diligence:

>> [...]

>>> 2. On the one hand, V says the word must have passed
>>> into Old French late (p441) because you don't get
>>> 'chanif' but 'canif' - (which, btw shows a profound
>>> ignorance of Picard, which preserves k, and you'd expect
>>> to find canif if the word was coming from the Germanic)
>>> then it's borrowed from Old French into Middle English
>>> and from there into Old Norse, with "Old English/Old
>>> Norse bilingualism in the Danelaw contributing" (p.439)
>>> (sic). So it's unlikely to get to England before 1066,

>> To be fair, there are a few OE words borrowed from OFr
>> before the Conquest; <prut> ~ <prud> 'proud' comes to
>> mind. But there certainly aren't very many.

> ON pruðr,

Should be <prúðr>.

> ODa., Da, Nw. id.,

I presume that you mean identical to <prud>, not to <prúðr>.

> OSw prudher.
> But it's a word in p- and may be loaned directly from that
> substrate..

Just once it would be nice if you'd do a little basic
research before mounting your hobbyhorse. The Romance
derivation of the OFr word is perfectly straightforward.
Lat. <pro:desse> 'to be of value, be good' gave rise to
post-class. Lat. <prode> 'profitable, advantageous, useful',
attested in Vetus Latina (Luke 9:25, <quid enim prode est
homini>; Vulgate has <quid enim proficit homo>), whence OFr
<prod, pro, pros, prot, proz>, <pru(d), prut> etc., <preu>,
and so on, with senses 'courageous, valiant, good, noble,
just, prudent, wise, profitable, advantageous'. Lat. tonic
/o:/ (free) became Gallo-Romance /ou/ and eventually
OCentralFr /eu/ (Fr. <preux>); in Picard, Walloon, and the
Western dialects, however, it was levelled to /u/, whence
the OE <prut, prud> (which, given the <-d> forms, looks like
a very early borrowing).

There is also no difficulty in taking ON <prúðr> 'fine,
magnificent, stately' to be a borrowing from OFr or OE; the
former is perhaps a bit more likely, given the semantics.
(The earliest attested sense of the OE word is negative,
'proud' in the sense 'arrogant, haughty'.)

[...]

> And you don't seem to have noted these in my posting:

I have de Vries and had already read his discussion. I saw
nothing in your comments that merited a response, just more
of the same old stuff.

(I also know that his etymologies have to be treated with
caution, and not just because they're getting a bit long in
the tooth, though he's usually safe enough back to PGmc.)

> Jan de Vries: Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
> under hn-

> 'Wörter mit dem anlaut hn- haben im germ. stark affektive
> bed.; sie wechseln mit solchen, die mit gn- und kn-
> anfangen. Im allgemeinen sind es germ. sonderbildungen,
> die sich nur ausnahmsweise auf idg. grundformen
> zurückführen lassen'

[...]

> The first quote makes one suspect we are dealing with
> words of a substrate.

It makes *you* think so.

Brian