Re: floor

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> ________________________________
> From: dgkilday57 <dgkilday57@...>
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Friday, August 5, 2011 5:49 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: floor
>
> [...]
>
> > But before proceeding further, I should check what Du Cange has to say about <larricium>.
>
> Enough to posit a West Mediterranean *larr-. I am trying to see whether West Germanic 'lark' can be referred to a NWB compound based on this substratal word.
>
>
> *****R I don't think lark can be linked to *larr because lark is from something like *lawarkaz; see Old Spanish laverca from Gothic or Frankish. There is a Scots word in an old song laverock which I think means "lark" but it's been a while
>

Yes. All the attested older forms have *law- but I have seen one suggestion that WGmc earlier had *larwarkjo:n vel sim. with the first /r/ lost to dissimilation. This raises at least the possibility of a NWB compound *larr(a)-warkan- vel sim. 'meadow-defender'(??), borrowed into WGmc and reinterpreted (at least in some OE dialects) as 'treason-worker', hence folk-etymological deformation. Here the loss of the stem-vowel of the first element would be regular in NWB in this position (as I have postulated for *Der(u)-went-) and the syllable-final -rr- would be shortened to -r- before its dissimilative loss. But the devil is in the details, and unless I can come up with a phonologically concrete scenario, this connection must be regarded as highly speculative.

The Old Spanish form is probably from Frankish, unless the Goths also borrowed it from WGmc. The word does not appear to be Common Gmc. The only Old Norse form is in a glossary and appears to have been borrowed from Old English.

At any rate, the etymology of <lark> is nothing but.

DGK