Re: floor

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "stlatos" <stlatos@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
>
> > In fact, it should be dismissed. The reconstruction which I had seen was WGmc *larw(a)riko:n in the AHD, evidently a misprint for *laiw-. No connection with *larr- 'meadow' can be justified.
> >
>
> Why would it begin with *laiw- ?

To explain the West Germanic forms like Old English <la:werce>.

> > It remains likely that we are dealing with a borrowed compound. Finnish seems to have borrowed only the first element, appending its native -nen. So far I have no concrete hypothesis on the sense of the compound or its source.
> >
>
> Why would they borrow the begining and end and not the middle? If PGmc was *laiw- and -o:N , that would makes it even odder.

I am not assuming that Finnish borrowed the end. What it apparently borrowed was the root *laiwo-, and not from Gmc., since the -o- would have been -a-. As a working hypothesis, I take the source language to be Venetic. The attested Padanian Venetic retains inherited -o-. Pokorny (IEW 652) suspected that the original sense of *laiwo- 'on the left' was originally 'bent', citing the Latin gloss <laevi boves> 'bulls with horns bent backwards'. Possibly *laiwo- in Northern Venetic referred to the similar shape of the crest on the crested lark. However, I still have no compelling explanation for the second part of WGmc *laiwa-rakjo:n (or whatever).

Another word which I suspect was borrowed by both Gmc. and Finnic from Venetic is 'ale'. Thomsen considered Finnish/Estonian <olut> to have been borrowed from Baltic, which got it from Gmc., and Pokorny took it as a direct loan from Gmc., but this fails to explain the /o/. However, Venetic *olut 'flowing bowl' vel sim. (formed like Latin <caput>, originally 'container, (round) vessel', from zero-grade) could explain both the Finnic word and Gmc. *aluT- as loans. Borrowing before the Grimm-Verner-Kluge shifting is consistent with the Gmc. name of the Veneti themselves.

DGK