From: tgpedersen
Message: 64828
Date: 2009-08-19
> >Other than the English "town" and German "fence" sense, there's Dutch tuin "garden" and Swedish and Danish tun "space between the houses in a village".
> > Is Germanic *tu:n- (> Engl <town>, Germ <Zaun>) considered to be
> > cognate to or an early loan from Celtic *du:n- as in OIr <du:n>
> > 'fortress, fortified city' and Welsh <din> 'fortress' (also
> > meanings such as 'camp', 'castle', 'fort' in these languages, not
> > sure which)? I believe the last I read was that the Celtic words
> > go back to PIE *dhu:n-, and the Germanic words are pre-Grimm's-
> > Law loans from Celtic. Is this still the accepted view?
> >
> > What is the original meaning of this *dhu:n-? Is it closer to
> > the Celtic meanings of 'fortified place, fortified settlement',
> > or to the Old English meaning 'enclosure', or to the OHG meaning
> > 'fence, hedge, enclosing barrier'? I see all of these meanings
> > possibly unified under the basic sense 'walled town' (thereby
> > both enclosed and fortified). This would suggest that the Old
> > English meaning is closer to the original sense than is the OHG
> > meaning, at least as I see it; would the present-day English
> > meaning 'town' possibly be much older than generally believed,
> > and go back to the original meaning 'walled town' without any
> > intervening OE meanings like 'yard, garden, field, manor, farm,
> > homestead, house, village'? Or is the Proto-Germanic meaning
> > definitely 'enclosing barrier' as in OHG and German is therefore
> > more conservative than English (which only had the meaning
> > 'enclosed place' and developments of this basic meaning,
> > apparently) at least within Germanic?
> >
> > Anybody care to answer these questions?
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> > Watkins mentions that these words are limited to Celtic and
> > Germanic. So it may be Celtic subtrate. If I had to guess an
> > original meaning, I'd say "height, hill", see English dune and
> > down "hill" < ? Briton and see "citadel, fortified high place" as
> > secondary meanings and "town" as a tertiary meaning
> >
>
>
> I just see where the American Heritage Dictionary derives all of
> these from the root *dheu&- "to close, finish, come full circle".
> From this point of view the meaning 'enclosure' would be the
> earliest (and I don't know whether the sense 'enclosed space' or
> 'enclosing barrier' would be earlier, I'd like to find out), from
> which 'walled town' might develop, then 'fortified height', then
> 'height, hill' (as OE <du:n> > NE <down> and MDu <du:ne> 'sandy
> hill' > NE <dune>).
>
> To me it seems that two different roots are involved: one that
> means 'a height' (thence in one stream 'hill', in another
> 'fortified height, castle, walled town'), and one that might mean
> 'to close, finish, come full circle' (thence 'enclosure', thence in
> one stream 'enclosed place, yard, village, town' and in another
> 'fence, hedge' -- but to me it seems the first stream could also
> have been 'enclosed place' > 'walled town' > 'town'?). In any case
> I think American Heritage's lumping all of these together is
> probably a bit of a stretch. I don't think it's natural to derive
> the word for 'hill' from a root meaning 'close, finish, come full
> circle'. I think they may have done this only to make *dheu&- seem
> close in meaning to *dheu- 'die'. I would assign the Germanic
> words to another root *deu&- or similar. The sense 'finish, come
> full circle' might be close enough to the meaning 'long, to last'
> for *deu&- in Latin <du:ra:re> and Greek <de:rós> 'long'.
>