An Alteuropäisch appellative as loanword?

Actually I mean Venetic, but one wouldn't like to cause offense, and
it's the same to me.

Germ. traben, Du. draven "trot" etc have no decent etymology, says Grimm.
Nor does Germ. trabant, Dutch drabant "foot soldier"/"satellite".
Grimm points to the Czech lands and 'drav' as origin, but -ant is no
Czech suffix. Some have tried to connect it to a causative *draif-j-,
but the vocalism is wrong.

River names, eg. in Poland *Draw-, *Dram-, *Draw-ant-.

Piotr mentioned that multi-root in his article as behaving like
another strange multi-root *gax-, *gam- "go", connected to
regular-ablauting *gWiwH3- (vel sim.!) "live". At least that's how I
remember it. Hm.

On top of that, the root looks like an a-variant of Gmc. *dri:v-
"drive", ie as if it were a cognate of it in a pre-ablaut IE language.

So I propose Venetic *dran,W- "pull a boat from the bank" -> "trotting
along next to a horse" (now I'm really pushing it!), related somehow
to the various draw/drag/trahere/trekken roots (and if they were loans
from Venetic too, we'd have a solution to the problem of the 'wrong'
anlauts). Recall Ariovistus' new tactical foot soldier + horseman units.


Torsten