--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> On 2009-07-27 00:39, george knysh wrote:
>
> > On the other hand if the Slavic and Baltic terms are borrowings
> > from Germanic, this would imply a time before the Grimm shift. Is
> > that why you are partial to Semitic (:=))?****
>
> Had it been borrowed before the operation of Grimm's Law, we would
> have Baltic and Slavic *g at the end of the root. Neither Baltic
> nor early Slavic had an /f/ phoneme, so the substitution /f/ -> /p/
> in a loan is normal and expected (as in Old Polish personal names
> of foreign origin like Szczepan 'Stephen', Pabian 'Fabian', etc.).
According to Vennemann, various third-consonant extensions to Semitic originally biliteral roots might take care of the auslaut variation.
Vennemann
Europa Vasconica - Europa Semitica
pp 665-666
'19.5. West and North Germ. +folk- 'warrior troop, people'
The OED says on the etymology of Engl. folk:
OE. folc str. neut. = OFris. folk, OS. folc (Du. volk), OHG. folc neut., masc. (MHG. volc neut., masc, mod.Ger. volk neut.), ON. folk neut., people, army, detachment (Sw., Da. folk):-
OTeut. *folkom. The original sense is perh. best preserved in ON.;
cf. OS1. plUkU (Russ. polk) division of an army, Lith. pulkas crowd, which are believed to be early adoptions from Teut. [256
The view of some scholars, that the Teut. word and the L. vulgus both descend from a common type *qolgos, is very doubtful.
The word has no generally accepted etymology. In Kluge/Seebold (1995: s.v.) one reads: "No exact comparative possibilties." As a matter of fact the assumption found there and also in (1989: 799), that connects the word with the present in 'full', is not probable. Of consequence is however - and, as one will see, the key to the solution of the etymological problem - the observation in the OED quote: The original sense is perh. best preserved in ON.; cf. OSl. plUkU (Russ. polk) division of an army." This is in particular evident in the following observation in Ehrismann (1970: 132): "The poet of the Heliand equated heri ['Heer', "army"] with folk (pl[ural]); a heri comprised several folk."23 The most exact sense of Old Germanic folk we find thus in the military field; it is, with the term introduced into the military terminology by Napoleon I., 'division'. The learned definition "A heri comprised several folk" is found in the Großer Brockhaus (s.v. Division) as follows: "The field army of the Bundeswehr has at its disposal 12 d[ivisions] ..."
Division is a nominalisation of Lat. di:videre "divide". From section 19.1. we already know, that in Semitic root forms of the structure plC (C: a consonant) can have the basic sense "to divide". In particular we saw in Hebrew the roor form plg with the sense "divide" and the extension plgh with the sense 'division, district (as division of a tribe)'. I see thus the 'folk' word as a Semitidic loanword with the root form plg, which was loaned early enough to assume, through the earliest Germanic sound changes, including the Proto-Germanic sound shift, the Proto-Northwest-Germanic form +folk-.
Not only folk 'division of an army', but also heri 'army' is probably a Semitidic loanword (cf. Vennemann 1995c: here chap. 7, section 7.25). The Semitidic loanwords Heer heri and folk thus form an exact Old Germanic parallel to the modern French loanwords army and Division. Both are typical superstrate loans of the category 1 of the preamble: the art of war.
The root plh. 'split' (or a related root form) probably hides also in Gr. pélekus, Sanskr. paras´ú- 'axe, battle axe'; also these loans presumably reflect military contacts, but most likely with Semitids of the South East, ie. with Semites. Of course equating Akkad. pilakku "spindle" is excluded for semantic reasons, there one must concur with Frisk (1991: s.v. pélekus); but thre is no way around the assumption of a loan of a Semitic noun with the original literal sense "splitter". [257
19.6. Old English and Old Norse +flokk- "crowd"
Engl. flock (ae. flocc), anord. flockr (schwed. flock, Dan. flok) should not be separated from the 'folk' word. On that OED says:
Not found in the other Teut. langs. The etymology is obscure. As both in OE. and ON. the word means only an assemblage of persons, it can hardly be connected with fly v.24; the hypothesis that it is cognate with folk is satisfactory with regard to meaning, but its phonological admissibility is doubtful.
The phonological problem exists of course only, when one wants to connect the two words as Indo-European inherited words. For loanwords with the same root from Semitidic with its manifold ablaut relations this problem doesn't exist. More exactly there might exist within Germanic a bridge; metatheses around a root-internal liquid do occur.'
My old *(a)p/BH-r/l- "divide; cross; two" obsession.
More third-letter extensions to pl- in his discussion of the 'plow' word.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/60453
I misremembered about Möller; turns out he doesn't have an etymology for 'folk', but he does use the Semitic pl- roots extensivly, also with both velar stop extensions.
The question is then whether we should assume a direct loan
Semitic -> PPGermanic, Baltic, Slavic,
or interject an intermediate language, the ar-/ur- language, Venetic or both.
Torsten