--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> At any rate, a similar correspondence seems to be
> attested in PGmc. *landa-, cf. Goth., ON land, OE land, lond, OS land,
> OHG, MHG, MLG lant, OFris. lond, land, MDu. lant "land" (beside
> *lendjo: in Swedish Dial. linda "fallow land", *lund- in ON lundr
> "grove"), as against Russian ljadá "overgrown field" (cf. also OPruss.
> lindan "valley"). The a-vocalism is also found in Celtic, cf. OIr.
> land "open place", Welsh llann "piece of land". In spite of a possible
> reconstruction PIE *londh-yo- (Pokorny 1959: 675), this geographical
> term only has a limited geographical distribution and is suspect of
> being a substratum word (cf. also Polomé 1990: 335). It appears to be
> attested in Basque landa "field", Catalan llanda "plain" (cf.
> Scardigli apud Lehmann 1986, s.v. land).
>
I agree this is a Celtic Wanderwort which spread to Germanic and Slavic, although IMHO the Baltic word doesn't belong here:
Celtic
*nantu- 'valley, brook'
Uralic
*lamti 'low land'
NEC
*tts^HwemV 'liquid' (where
s^ represents a voiceless lateral fricative)
On the other hand, the Catalan form is actually
landa 'heath', surely a borrowing from French
lande id., in turn a direct descendant of Gaulish
*landa:. There's also the Basque collective form
landar (Biscayan) 'uncultivated land', which along Gaulish suggests the original meaning was 'heath, uncultivated land'.
I'd compare the Celtic word with Gascon
brana, branda 'heath', leading to reconstructing a voiceless labial fricative /
F/ (quoted as /
f/ by some authors) in the protoform
*Flanda:. In my own model this would be related to other IE words meaning 'sprout', 'root' or similar, ultimately derived from verbal roots meaning 'to push', 'to grow' or 'to turn'. I hope to give further details in the future.
I must remark that in the revised PIE model, traditional PIE roots become "IE words" which in turn are derived from a paleo-IE root at the genuine PIE level. And most often a paleo-IE root is the source of several IE words, reflecting the paleo-dialectal fragmentation in the IE family before the leveling process of the Chalcolithic-Bronze Age (although possibly others might have happened before, in the Neolithic and even earlier).