Re: was The Finnic issue

--- On Sat, 7/2/11, dgkilday57 <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>GK: Only one of the three Ventas is connected to the Belgae. The others are Venta Icenorum and Venta Silurum. Looks like the poor Veneti got it from everybody (:=)). But seriously, I think the link to the discussion mentioned by Brian Scott is useful, and the notion that "venta" was a borrowing into Celtic worthy of further study. On the Venet/Vened problem cf. also ch. 3 here: http://books.google.com/books?id=5aoId7nA4bsC&pg=PA87&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

I agree with the author that Venetic should not be classified with Illyrian (or Macro-Illyrian), and the notion of "Veneto-Illyrian" has led to great confusion in the literature. However, the notion that the Veneti were pre-Indo-European is groundless. The author's negativism about IE substrate problems is excessive. These problems are indeed difficult, and some may be insoluble, but until we know that sufficient information is simply unavailable, we have no business waving the white flags.



The fact that only one of the three Ventae was explicitly associated with the Belgae by ancient authors is not fatal to the hypothesis about <Venta> which I proposed. In Caesar's time, the Continental Belgae were culturally and linguistically distinct from the Gauls.

****GK: Do you have a notion (or better) about the specifics of this distinctiveness? There is a discussion in the cybalist archives (inconclusive) trying to make sense of Caesar's famous statement. The best I could come up with is that Caesar's initial description of the Belgae fits the Nervii very well (they are thus his prime "Belgan" reference point). If we then add the fact that the Belgae crossed over from Germania, chased out the locals, and had Germanic associates (some mentioned directly as such others (the Nervii et al.) possible by implication) the idea dawned that the "3rd" language of Gallia (for Caesar) besides Gaulish and Aquitanian was simply...Germanic. Despite the fact that many Belgae were actually Gaulish-speaking (including those who conquered portions of Britain). Cf. also final query below after your other analyses.*****


Bede however knew of only three pre-Roman peoples in Britain, namely the Britons, Scots, and Picts. By the time of his earliest sources, the Insular Belgae had already been assimilated to the Britons. If indeed the Belgae made Venetic *Wenetja: into *Wentt(j)a, and this was further reduced to Britto-Latin <Venta>, the place called Venta Belgarum might simply be the last one where unassimilated Insular Belgae lived.



P.R. Kitson (p. 80 of "British and European River-Names", TrPhS 94:73-118, 1996) suggested that <Venta> was hypostasized from the suffix *-went- presumed to be in <Bannaventa>, <Glannoventa>, and probably <Derventio> 'the Derwent etc.' (which he regards as an alteration of the original river-name, as explained below). This suffix is Indo-European and signifies 'full of, abounding in, rich in'. In Greek it forms athematic adjectives like <kharíeis> (*kharí-went-s) 'graceful' from <kháris> 'grace'. Latin uses different suffixes, -o:so- and -lento-, in this sense. However, *-wento- is found in the place-name <Maluentum> if I am correct in understanding it as 'Abounding in Mallows'. (Plautus has trissyllabic <larua> for classical <larva>, so I am assuming that <malva> was earlier *malua. This word is of East Mediterranean origin and has a short root-syllable, so it probably did not come into Italic directly from non-IE substrate, but
indirectly through Japygian, that is, the Central Italian form of Illyrian. <Maluentum> for *Maluventom is like <fui:> for Old Latin <fuvei>. The /a/ was necessarily short; otherwise the intentional folk-etymological alteration to <Beneventum> 'Well-Come' would not have occurred, since it depends on <Maluentum> sounding like <male ventum> 'ill-come'.) In Kitson's scenario, names of the form *X-venta meaning 'full of X' were reinterpreted as 'place of X', leading to the extraction of *venta 'place'. This is more plausible than Ifor Williams's guess that *venta equals <forum>, but serious difficulties remain.



Kitson notes (p. 79) that *-went- "has not been recognized as occurring in Celtic lexical items ... Yet it must be presumed to have been available at an early period, especially since it was productive in the neighbouring stock Italic." I cannot agree with this presumption. <Maluentum> is probably Illyrian rather than Italic, and its replacement <Beneventum> is a creation of the Hannibalic War. Extrapolation from Italic to Celtic morphological behavior is risky anyhow, considering that the /nt/-participle is highly productive in Italic but not at all in Celtic. Moreover it is semantically difficult to regard <Bannaventa> and <Glannoventa> as formed within Celtic using the suffix *-went- in its original sense. <Bannaventa> (also <Bannavanta>, <Bennovenna>) referred to a hill-fort of the Catuvellauni near modern Daventry, and probably to another place which St. Patrick called home. Nobody seems to doubt that
the first element is identical to Gaelic <beann> 'peak, hill, height'. But why on earth would a single hill, or a place occupying one, be called 'Full of Hills'? Such an adjective properly applies to a district, not a single place.

*****GK: Just in passing. J. Harmatta suggests that the ethnonym "Sadagarii" ('full of hills'(people) in Iranic) refers (5th c.)to transplanted Roxolani in Scythia Minor, so called because if their barrow burial practice.*****



The variation in form renders it dubious that *-went- was originally part of this name at all. If it was pre-Celtic, the first element (whatever it was) could simply have been folk-etymologized to *bend-no-, *benno- 'peak, hill' by Celtic-speakers.



Similarly, <Glannoventa> (also <Glannabenta>, <Glanovenda>, <Clanoventa>), a maritime town of the Brigantes near modern Ravenglass, is presumed to mean 'Full of Shores' or 'Full of Banks'. This is bizarre on its face, since one seldom deals with more than one shore, or two banks, at a time. I am not opposed to this name originally including *-went-, but I doubt that the first element is identical to the second of <Amboglanna> 'Riverbank', a town of the Otadeni at Hadrian's Wall near modern Burdswald. (The correct form is probably *Ambiglanna, since we have Gallo-Latin <ambis> 'river' (Chron. Gall., 452 CE) and <ambicus> 'type of fish' (Polem. Silv., ca. 450; MS. <ambions>, but nobody doubts the correction).) If the first part of <Glannoventa> has undergone Celtic folk etymology after 'shore, bank', perhaps the pre-Celtic form was *Glandiwenta: 'Abounding in Nuts or Acorns', the stem being
*gWl&2-ndi- (Latin <glans>, <glandis>; P-Italic *bland- is probably in <Blandusia>, site of a fountain in the Sabine country; Greek <bálanos> has a thematic suffix, *gWl.h2-no-).



Several British rivers had the Latinized name <Derventio>. Ekwall, Jackson, and more recently R. Geraint Gruffydd ("Where was Rhaeadr Derwennydd?", FS Hamp 261-6, 1990) take the British protoform as *Derwéntiü: 'river where oaks grow abundantly, river flowing through an oak-wood'. Rivers thus named include the modern Darwen, Darenth, two Darts, Little Dart, and four Derwents. The Welsh Derwennydd is referred to a British by-form *Derwentíjü:. Noting the difficulty of explaining the segment -ent-, Kitson regards the name as a Celtic folk-etymological reshaping of *Druantia or *Dravantia, a river-name well represented on the Continent constituting an important member of Krahe's Old European hydronymy. Comparing the Sanskrit river-name <Dravanti:>, he infers that the OEH formation is participial and means 'Running'. This is plausible enough as far as OEH is concerned, and Kitson has done an excellent job later in the paper
demonstrating that the OEH system is indeed Indo-European as Krahe maintained, not Vasconic as Vennemann argued. Unfortunately, his explanation of <Derventio> requires the rather heavy-handed folk-etymological deformation of *Draw- to *Derw-, as well as the poorly supported assumption of *-went- being productive in prehistoric Celtic.



A Gallo-Latin <Derventum> is known from central Gaul (modern Drévant, southeast of St.-Amand-Montrond, about 40 km south of Bourges). Conventional wisdom makes this a native Celtic name 'Oak-Grove' vel sim., but again the segment -ent- is unexplained. Therefore, I propose that this name is pre-Celtic. The place is quite far from the coastal areas frequented by the Veneti, so a more likely source is Continental Belgic (or "Northwest Illyrian", to be identified with the language of Kuhn's Nordwestblock). The formation in this view is parallel to *Maluwentom, but the /u/ of *Deruwentom underwent Belgic syncope of a short vowel in an open second syllable following a short first syllable, as I have already postulated to get <Venta> out of the Belgic form of *Wenetja:. Since *deru- outside of Celtic usually means 'wood' or 'tree', not specifically 'oak', the sense of *Der(u)wentom was probably 'place abounding in trees, thicket, copse' vel
sim. And in this view the British *Derwéntiü: was simply borrowed from a Belgic antecedent without folk-etymological deformation, regardless of the Celtic association with 'oak' rather than 'tree'. Whether the Belgic suffix *-i(j)o:(n), or whatever it was, was simply associative, yielding '(river) involving thickets', or was based on *ei- 'to go', yielding '(river) going through a thicket', I cannot say.



NWB students may object that Derventum is a long way from the Nordwestblock as delineated by Kuhn. Yes it is, but we have a good example of a similar outlier, not quite so far south, among river-names. The apa-Namen are largely restricted to the NWB, but we have a medieval river Latinized as Cantapia in three French departments (recorded 997 CE in Mayenne, now Chantache; 1025 in Eure-et-Loir; 1177 in Calvados), and a town Chantepie southeast of Rennes very likely resulting from folk-etymological deformation of *Cantapia to a phrase 'sing-magpie' (cf. Chantemerle, Chanteloup, Chante Renard, etc.). (The notion that the attested <Cantapia> actually originated this way from *canta-pica (P. Skok, ZRPh 32:560, 1908) cannot be taken seriously.) At any rate, it is not implausible that a large part of what was northern Celtic Gaul in Caesar's time had been Belgic-speaking a few centuries earlier.


****GK: Would I be correct in assuming that you consider Belgic to have been a NWB dialect?****



DGK