From: dgkilday57
Message: 65056
Date: 2009-09-18
>Why don't loanwords into modern English form plurals like <children>?
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
> >
> > --- 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.
>
> Why couldn't it be borrowed into PPGmc. as *kantú-?
> > Identifying substratal loanwords in Germanic requires more thanIn your extensive citations from the UEW I don't see any *kantu-, or anything suggesting *kantu-, in the donor language. Whence -u- if not an inherited IE formation?
> > 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.
>
> How do we know those supposed archaic formation aren't chimeric, and actually belonging in the donor language? Anyway, that's what I'll propose.
> > My best guess at a PIE protoform is *kóndHu- 'pincher, squeezer',I already expressed doubt that everything referred to *ken- by Pokorny is really IE. The 'knoll' word fits poorly semantically, since it means more like 'swelling', and the 'knob' word has a geminated media; I'm willing to concede that many of these are NOT inherited by Gmc. from PIE the usual way. I think 'rye' both with and without -gg- came from an IE lg. of the Illyrian type (sorry, not Venetic) and will say more later; I suspect that both Kuhn's NWBlock lg. and Schrijver's lg. of gemm. are "really" NW Illyrian, with some loans from the West Mediterranean substrate.
> > 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.
>
> de Vries:
> 'knoka schw. V. 'schlagen, prügeln',
> nisl. hnoka 'unruhig sein', nnorw. knoka,
> nschw. dial. knåka,
> ndä. knuge 'drücken, klemmen'.
> mhd. knochen 'knuffen' und
> ae. cnocian, cnucian 'schlagen, stossen'.
> vgl. knúi und knjúkr.
>
> usw. usw. usw.
>
> How can a root that behaves like that be considered IE?
> > Verner and several contemporaries regarded 'hand' as connected withI'm working on 'glass', have some old papers to read. Regarding the long list of words with gramm. Wechsel, I'll pick a few and try to prove they are IE, inherited the usual way.
> > 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.
>
> Actually I considered connecting them, but outside IE, in the donor language, whichever that is.
>
> Note that those Germanic nouns for which alternations show the effect of Verner, smell funny too:
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/62159
> which might lead one to believe that PPGmc had no mobile stress in nouns, only in verbs, and those cases which which seem to have had that only show the effect of loaning from language ewhich did have mobile stress in nouns. Note that *glas-(/*glar-) is one of them, and that is suspected of being Venetic (as spoken by Aestians).
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/62525Mixed bag of memories. I missed the obvious problem the first time around with your reading Venetic <ka.n.ta ruma.n[.]na> as 'Roman tribe' or whatever. In <dona.s.to> the first <o> represents /o:/ (cf. Lat. <do:na:vit>) so <u> cannot represent /o:/ in the same position. It looks like <ka.n.ta> is a praenomen, and if we can't etymologize it, it won't help us with 'hand'.
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/62535
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/64139
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/61079
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/59612
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/63465
> In short, I see a semantic developmentIf we need a donor in the first place.
> "carry, support" ->
> "carrying pole/beam", and since there are two of those ->
> "edge", and, used in warfare ->
> "wing of battle formation" (remember the Roman caput porci, ON svínfylking, battle formation of several cunei, the various nations in an alliance fought separately beside each other,
> cf. Caesar's description of Ariovitus' battle formation,
> cf. Gmc *folk-, Russian polk "regiment") ->
> "troop, people".
> In that development the first element "carry, support" is found only in Uralic, not in IE so we must look east for the donor.