Re: Town, Zaun, and Celtic Dun-

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

>
> --- 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-?

More like: 'anything small or filthy which women should take care of'

> (I'm not sure of the laryngeal notation of the latter,

Nor am I.

> which is based on Latin paucus, paulus, parvus, puer, pullus, and
> Greek paîs).

Explain this then:
Vannetais Breton paoter "little boy",
Dutch peuter "small child",
Latin puer "boy"

> > > > > 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.

I don't think that is self-evident at all. What would you think of the possibility of pure coincidence if you found names like 'Lakeesha' or 'Jawanda' of someone living in Japan, and would you infer something about connection to other people named 'Lakeesha' or 'Jawanda' living in the USA and Canada?

> 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,

Obviously I wouldn't, on the basis of names alone.

> but [p] did occur in initial position in OE, though infrequently,

Kuhn, same article:
'Heimat in einer niederen Schicht, darin stimmen die indogermanischen Wörter mit anlautendem b- und die meisten unserer Stämme mit p- im Anlaut überein. Davon ausgenommen sind bei uns fast einzig solche Wörter, die mit sachlichen Neuerungen und dem Handel gekommen sein können, lateinische wie andere. Ihre Sonderstellung tritt schon in den alten Quellen klar an den Tag. Die Lieder der Edda im Norden, der Beowulf in England, der altsächsische Heliand und Otfrids Werk im Süden, diese vier ältesten großen dichterischen Werke oder Sammlungen in vier Teilen Germaniens zusammen enthalten von den erörterten Wortstämmen (ohne die lateinischen) nicht mehr als fünf, davon vier typische Kultur- oder Wanderwörter:
*paþ-„Pfad" (Beow. Otfr.),
*paid- „Rock" (Beow. Hel.),
*pan(n)ing- „Pfennig" (Edda Otfr.) und
*plo:g- „Pflug" (Edda Otfr.).
Der fünfte Stamm ist *pleg-(pflegen), dessen Bedeutungskreis auffallend weit und dessen Herkunft und älteste Verwendung unklar sind. '

"At home in a lower layer, that applies to the IE stems in b- in anlaut and most of our stems in p-. Excepted from that we have only such words as could have arrived with material innovations and trade, Latin as others. Their special position is obvious already in the old sources. The songs of the Edda in the North, the Beowulf in England, the Old Saxon Heliand and Otfrids work in the South, these four oldest great poetic works or collections in four parts of Germania together contain of the mentioned word stems no more than five (without the Latin ones), of which four typical culture or Wanderwörter:
*paþ- "path" (Beow. Otfr.),
*paid- "coat" (Beow. Hel.),
*pan(n)ing- "penny" (Edda Otfr.) und
*plo:g- "plough" (Edda Otfr.).
The fifth stem is *pleg- (play), the field of senses of which is conspicuously wide and the provenance and oldest use of which are unclear".

> 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 the examples you provided show the opposite: 'Lakeesha' or 'Jawanda' are not just designators of individuals but imply also something the bearers have in common, namely their ethnicity, which is what Kuhn assumed.

> > > 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/?

Brythonic would have /p/ from /kW/, otherwise you're right. Stephen Oppenheimer thinks they spoke Germanic already before the Saxon conquest, I think they spoke Venetic/NWBlock, at least in some areas.

> > 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?

Yes it does. Brian is against it here, Chris Gwinn stopped posting here partly because of this (I think).

> > 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.

Ah, thought you'd never ask. Voilà:
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/KuhnText/list.html
Cleaning it up has been on my to-do list for some time since I discovered that many of these have cognates in Uralic and Finno-Ugric, so I think I'll use a couple of days for that.

Now, if you want to defend you theory of ideophone or imitative origin of English or Old English names in p-, you'd have to come up with similar explanation for all 35 of this list too.


Torsten