At 6:25:47 PM on Friday, June 26, 2009, Joao S. Lopes wrote:
> Although my great-great-great-grandmother was German from
> Rhineland, I cannot read German, so I will try to
> translate this text.
Sorry; I should have translated it. Here's a loose but
adequate translation:
Difficult. Perhaps Raetic *Tir-ále. The ending <-ale> is
characteristic of Raetic; it marks the so-called
pertinentive case, that is, a locative of a genitive.
This case also has the function of assigning an object or
individual to a place or person. *Tirále most likely
signified 'in the province of a person named *Tir-'. That
would make <Tirol> a former Raetic regional name, like the
name <Schenna>, most likely from Raetic *Skenja or
*Skenje, which could have meant 'belonging to a person
named *Skeni'.
> If I understood correctly what is stated, Tirol came from
> a proto-form *Tira:le. -a:le seems the Latin suffix -a:lis
> (cf. dentalis, ruminalis, moralis).
Brian