>And at the same time too dis-similar to be straight inheritance from >PIE, so they must be loans.
>
>As for the -b- instead -p- of cioban which you were wondering about
If Äoban, Äaban, Äolpan & the like, from the Turkic languages,
is supposed to have played a role, then these terms should be
examined; esp. to investigate whether the term once had other
meanings than "shepherd" in modern Turkish and several other
languages, namely whether it had the connotation of some (Scythian?
Hunnic?) social *rank* (in the upper class). In Turkic languages,
Ãoban, Ãaban or Ãolpan are the names of Venus (morning star)
[here ç = Ä]; in Hungarian legends there is a "wandering Csaba"
(Ãaba), seen as one of Attila's sons (probable: Irnik/Erngek).
According to some researchers, Csaba might be the vague remembrance
of Kuber/Kovrat, a Protobulgarian ruler in the 7th century, or a
Protohungarian chieftain in the 10th century. The tenth century
Petchenegs (Polovtsians) (contemporary of the Protohungarian
character Csaba) had among their uluses/tribes one called Ãoban,
a nane rendered by emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus in Greek
around AD 950 as Tsopon. Perhaps it wasn't a mere nickname "the
shepherds".
>Not Romance, I think. I suspect instead that <schöffe>/<schepen>
>is a pre-Grimm loan in Germanic. If it came with the Bastarnian >invasion of Przeworsk and later Germany it might even be a
>loan from Dacian.
If a loanword, then a greater plausibility has the Slavic zhupan
and zhupa. The relevant German-Slavic relationship was there,
for several centuries, exactly in the areas where zhupan was in
relevant usage, and - what's more! -, Schöppe/Schöffe/Saupe appeared
a bit later: these variants seem to have been used more and more
only in the MHG period, and not in the OHG one.
If Turkic chaban might have played a role (a plausibility tending
to nill, however), then it's notable that a presumed appropriate
semantic of the word might have been in use in fitting time
periods as well: during the hunnic impact (and symbiosis with
several Germanic populations, e.g. Gepids, Goths), during the
Avar impact (the Avar ruling glass ruling over a tremendous
Slavic and Alanian "underling" class, of which, both Avars and
Slavs, parts were absorbed by the Eastern Franks, i.e. by the
Bavarian speaking Germans, chiefly in Austria and Bohemia.)
George