Re: Town, Zaun, and Celtic Dun-

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
> > I'm not knowledgeable in this area, but isn't it possible that people might acquire nicknames that might be onomatopoeic representations of some distinctive quality they have, such as chubbiness, height, colour, etc.?
>
> 'Onomatopoeia or onomatopœia, from the Greek onomatopoiía (omo,a for "name" and poiéo: for "I make"), is one or more words that imitate or suggest the source of the sound they are describing.'
>
> What is the sound of chubbiness, height and colour?
> I don't understand what you mean.

In the Wikipedia article on onomatopoeia:

"Manner imitation [a subset of onomatopoeia - AJ]
Main article: Ideophone

"In many of the world's languages, onomatopoeia-like words are used to describe phenomena apart from the purely auditive. Japanese often utilizes such words to describe feelings or figurative expressions about objects or concepts. For instance, Japanese barabara is used to reflect an object's state of disarray or separation, and shiiin is the onomatopoetic form of absolute silence (used at the time an English speaker might expect to hear the sound of crickets chirping or a pin dropping in a silent room, or someone coughing). It is used in English as well with terms like bling, which describes the shine on things like gold, chrome or precious stones. In Japanese, kirakira is used for glittery things."

Note especially the last two sentences. But it is now apparent that the correct word I was looking for was 'ideophone', although there is no accepted English word for the process of devising ideophones, such as *ideophony.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism

> > In OE times couldn't actual given names, as opposed to nicknames,
> > arise by this means?
>
> Well tell me what chubbiness, height and colour sound like, and I'll answer that.

Chubbiness could have been represented by the [b] phoneme for example (for the bouncy, bubbly sound of chubbiness -- the sound of the bouncing of fat -- or the protuberance of a pot belly, like IE words with [b-] denoting protuberance). I can't think of what [p] might represent: maybe smallness, like IE *pu-/pau-? (I'm not sure of the laryngeal notation of the latter, which is based on Latin paucus, paulus, parvus, puer, pullus, and Greek paîs).

>
> > > > It's also interesting how the OE names mentioned above
> > > > sometimes have sound combinations that probably would not occur
> > > > under normal Germanic sound-laws: Putta, Pœtt as examples.
> > > > Perhaps onomatopeia or mere improvisation has something to do
> > > > with all these names.
> > >
> > > I don't think Putta pottered about more than other people and if
> > > he did, he probably didn't make any matching sound. As for
> > > 'improvisation', what is that?
> >
> > I basically meant making up names out of thin air. I think this is
> > what happens when African-American parents name their daughters
> > 'Lakeesha' or 'Jawanda' and names like that.
>
> See below.
>
> > > And why would English 'improvisations' lead to the same names as
> > > Illyrian or Etruscan?
> >
> > Pure coincidence.
>
> So could in principle the rest of linguistics, then.

I think there's a difference when talking about correspondences between words which have a definite meaning (linguistics) and words which function like ID numbers (onomastics) and therefore need not be non-coincidentally identical or similar to those of a related people in order for them to be understood similarly. Names can take any form across generations, and they all have the exact same function, whereas words must be understood from generation to generation and therefore should not take any form from generation to generation, but rather should be identical, or as similar as comprehension mandates, to those of the previous generation. A name always means 'set of phonemes providing identification of an individual human being', yet we do not use the same set of phonemes for every individual human being across generations (only rarely, as in James I, James II, James III, etc.). Words, on the other hand, which have a certain meaning, must retain approximately the same set of phonemes from one generation to the next in order for their meaning to be understood across those generations. Thus similarity of form in words (which linguistics studies) between related languages often corresponds to similarity of meaning; similarity of names between persons, countries, generations, etc. means nothing because names always have the same meaning ('phonemes used for the identity of this person') unlike words which have various meanings. In words variety of form means variety of semantics and function; in names variety of form does not because they all have the same semantic function (though of course they refer to many different individuals - but all of them fall under the same class 'human being', unlike the rest of the words of language).

I'm trying hard to convey my point (of the inherent possibility of pure coincidence in name similarity), which I hope you have understood; to me it seems self-evident and need not be questioned. If you're saying that the fact that these names begin with [p] proves that they derive from a substrate and cannot be ideophones or improvised because OE wouldn't use that phoneme in initial position, well, I can understand that, but [p] did occur in initial position in OE, though infrequently, and if the names derive from ideophone-creation or from improvisation, as I suspect they might, it is not unrealistic to think that some of them might begin with [p] just as some OE words, of whatever origin, began with [p].

>
> > But I'm definitely not against the substrate idea, or the foreign
> > origin (Illyrian, Etruscan, whatever) idea.
>
> That would be a substrate in England and NWEurope. Question is whether that substrate came with the Saxon etc invaders or already existed in Britain,

I was going to mention this very point in my last message, but declined because I thought I was becoming factually wrong, since the pre-English occupants of Britain were Celtic were they not, and therefore would not have had /p/?

> the latter would explain why there are so few Celtic loans in English; the loans are there, but they are not Celtic.

Which answers my above question: the pre-English occupants of Britain (in that part of Britain) were not Celtic. But doesn't this go against everything we have been taught and against history?

>The best candidates for such words would be words of non-Germanic structure (eg. in p-) which also occur in the insular Celtic languages, *plus* in Breton where a loan of them from English would be unlikely.
>

Have these candidates for such words been researched already? Sounds like an excellent area for research if it hasn't been done already.

>

>

Andrew