I should probably read what's been written at lengths before, but I'm lazy.
<Hercynia> is seen as a latinization of a Celtic word corresponding to
Gmc. *fergun- "mountain". Today it struck me that if Lith. <Perkunas>
"god of heaven and thunder", ON <Fjörgyn> "mother of Thor" is the same
word, that would give us an independent example of the IE dualism
"stone/hammer" ~ "sky" that we glean from the "hammer" word.
And now I'm thinking: Since the Hercynian forest spanned across central
Europe from the Rhine to the horizon of the known world, is it actually
possible that *perkW-un- is reconstructable for Indo-European not only
as a generic "mountain (range)" but as a toponym designing the
Carpathian mountains, and could that be the very origin of the IE
semantic duality? Would the Carpathians be the "sky mountains" seen from
the Pontic plain? Would that be where the god of thunder killed the
dragon and unleashed the waters?
[The reason I came to think of this was Bjorvand & Lindeman's entry for
<furu> "pine tree". It's easily derived from IE *perkW-, but,
paraphrasing, the semantic shift is almost unsurmountable unless we take
the common origin to be a mere descriptive "mountain tree" as in OE
<ferg'enbea:m>. My reason for looking was actually the word <bark>
"barch", thinking it might be something like a back-formation from
compounds with *perkW-, providing another possible semantic bridge. But
"mountain" is better.]
--
Trond Engen