--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> Peter Schrijver
> Lost Languages in Northern Europe
> in: Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European
>
> [...]
>
> A second example of direct contact between the language of geminates
> and a branch of Uralic is the Germanic word hand (Gothic handus etc.)
> < Proto-Germanic *hand-. All attempts at an Indo-European etymology of
> this word remain unconvincing (see recently Kluge & Seebold 1989:
> 353). Yet if we take Grimm's and Verner's Laws into account, we may
> reconstruct *hand- as *kant-. This looks strikingly like a cognate of
> Proto-Finno-Ugric *käti 'hand, arm', but with a nasal infixed into the
> root. Since this nasalization is not a feature of Finno-Ugric, or of
> Indo-European (outside the nasal presents, that is), and since it is a
> feature of the language of geminates, it is reasonable to conclude
> that Finno-Ugric *käti was borrowed by the language of geminates, from
> which it subsequently entered Germanic before Verner's Law and Grimm's
> Law.
I find it hard to believe that Proto-Germans would have assigned a loanword lacking final /u/ to the feminine /u/-declension, rather than one of the more common paradigms. During historical times the Gmc. fem. /u/-decl., never high in members, loses ground. Old High German has already brought 'hand' into the /i/-decl., although traces of the /u/-decl. persist in Old and Middle HG. In Old English, beside <hand> only a handful of fem. /u/-stems are in common use. Indeed if the substratal protoform was *ka(n)t-, the Proto-Germans must have appended a stressed feminine *-ú- in order for Verner's Law to yield Gmc. *hanðu-, whence Gothic <handus> and the rest. This is not merely implausible, but without parallel. Identifying substratal loanwords in Germanic requires more than just throwing Grimm's and Verner's Laws at the alleged protoforms. The morphology of the attested forms must be considered as well. In this case I think that *handu- is an inherited Indo-European word of archaic formation.
My best guess at a PIE protoform is *kóndHu- 'pincher, squeezer', from *kendH- 'to pinch, squeeze, compress', in turn an enlargement of *ken- 'compact, compressed'. This primary adjectival root is Pokorny's *ken-(1) (IEW 558) under which are listed mostly nominal extensions of zero-grade *kn-, and some words whose IE origin is doubtful (Sanskrit <kanda-> m. 'bulb'; Greek <kóndos> 'horn, ankle-bone', <kóndulos> 'knuckle'). Nevertheless the enlargement *kendH- 'to make compact, compress, squeeze' has a good parallel in *weidH- 'to make apart, divide, separate' from the adjectival root *wei- 'apart, disjoint, in two' (mostly in zero-grade *wi-, sometimes dual *wi:- < *wih-, IEW 1175, 1127). As a morphological parallel to *kóndHu- I regard Greek <kórthus> 'millstone' (Theophrastus) as derived from PIE *g^Her- 'short, small, fine-grained'; here the adjectival root (Pokorny's *g^Her-(6), IEW 443) is enlarged to *g^HerdH- 'to make small, grind' which in turn yields the agential *g^HórdHu- 'grinder, millstone', Proto-Greek *kHórtHu-, by Grassmann's Law <kórthus>. The same adjectival *g^Her- appears in two other archaic IE formations in Greek: *g^Hén-g^Hro- 'small-grained material', Greek <kégkhros> 'millet; fish-spawn'; *g^H´n.-g^Hru-, Grk. <kákhrus> 'winter-bud' (Thphr.), 'parched barley' (Aristophanes). The latter's variant <kágkhrus> is probably a cross between these forms.
Verner and several contemporaries regarded 'hand' as connected with the Gmc. strong verb *henþ- 'to capture' reflected in Goth. <frahinþan>, <-hanþ>, <-hunþans> 'id.', Swedish <hinna> 'to obtain, reach', Danish dialectal <hinne> 'id.', in which case *hanðu- would be the correct Gmc. form and my explanation would fail. More recently however Seebold saw "keine sichere Vergleichsmöglichkeit" between 'hand' and *henþ-. Such a connection would require an oxytone /o/-grade agent, PIE *kontú- 'catcher', to be formed from *kent-, then inherited into Gmc. in the sense 'hand'. This is, in my opinion, more difficult to justify morphologically and semantically than what I proposed above.
DGK