Re: Schoeffe I

>Ukrainan chołóp "serf, peasant",
>Belorussian cholóp,
>Old Russian cholopъ, n. pl. -i, g. pl. -ej
>(Mosk. Urk. 16.-17. Jhdt., s. Sobolevskij Lekcii 198),
>Russian - Church Slavonic chlapъ "servant, slave",
>Old Bulgarian chlapъ δου~λος, ο`ικέτης (Supr.),
>Bulgarian chlápe n., chlapák "boy",
>Serbo-Croat hl`àp g. hl`àpa and hlâp,
>Slovenian hlâp "boor",
>Czech, Slovak chlap "fellow, farmer, man",
>Polish. chłop,
>Upper Sorbian khłop, khłopc "fellow, chap",
>Lower Sorbian kłopc. ||

It is this list of variants the one that drew my attention and
reminded me that word I was talking of. So, now it is clear to
me that those who used it regionally, colloquially and slangily
must have used a loanword either from Bulgarian/Serbian/Croatian
or from Czech/Slovakian/Ruthenian. (The rendering chl- > shkl-
also fits, since the chl- cluster is unusual, "exotic", to
Hungarians and Rumanians. On top of that, in the dialect of the
region where I used to hear the loan variant, two old Slavic loans
for "weak & lean", slab, and for "lard; bacon" släninä respectively
are pronounced with an additional fictive -k-: sclab /sklab/ and
skläninä /skl&-'ni.../, perhaps a relic of the vulgar Latin sclavus,
sclavinus. This phenomenon has almost vanished in the latest
decades and is unknown to the rest of the Romanian speaking world.)

But what would be then the *semantic* intermediary from the Slavic
meanings to the German judiciary meaning of Schöffe? Perhaps only
the specialized meaning "someone who helps, a servant, a bailiff".
It is this the older sense of a Schöffe (for centuries) prior to
the modern meaning ("a judge's assistant; juror").

Well, it might fit. You've made a discovery; high time this was
included in dictionaries. :)

>or "castrated servant" (OÅ¡tir Archiv 36, 444, Sobolovskij RFV.

Aha, sort of an overlapping chlop- + skopets.

>Gothic hilpan "help" (Korsch Potanin-Festschr. 537, against it
>Endzelin c. 1. 42).

Is this already generally acknowledged? I mean, whether Germanic
help/hilp/hülp/helf/hilf/hülf is the origin of all those
chlop-/chlap-/cholp- variants. (Hilfsarbeiter: *chloporob. :-))

>further German Schalk (Brückner EW. 180)

Oh! This is interesting. My dictionary says "OHG scalc, Goth.
skalks ´´Knecht, Diener, Unfreier`` (i.e. "servant"; cf. OFrank.
mareskalk > marshall; in today's German it would render a perfect
Mährenschalk, only that Schalk today rather means a "joking person".
Cf. the saying "Er hat den Schalk im Nacken.") And the dictionary
adds: "__weitere Herkunft unklar__". (In German onomastics, there
are whole lotta Schalk, Gottschalk etc. E.g., former East-Germany's
chief coordinator of the hard-currency transactions of the commie
regime had the name Schalck-Golodkowsky.)

>Greek σκόλοψ "pointed pole" (Loewenthal Archiv 37, 386).

This is related with Slavic stl(u)p- (also borrowed by Hungarian:
oszlop; perhaps cölöp /tsölöp/ as well). (Here again the "unsure"
rendering of sk- > s(t)l-, VslV- and the like.)

As for those lists containing /kel-, klüpt-, klept-/, they suggest
that the "servant" was also a "thief" (who concealed stolen goods)?
(Heaving read the list with those Romance, Greek, Celtic etc. words,
I ask myself whether this possibly opens an additional path in
speculating on the etymology of Rumanian cälätor "traveler". In
Protorumanian times, a "cälätor" was some kind of traveler, merchant
and guide. Up to now, one had speculated on calle (syn for via "road,
way") and caballus (that rendered in Rumanian cal "horse" & cälare
"mounted" & a cäläri "to ride a horse, donkey" etc.). But those
calators in early medieval times must also have been smugglers a la
carte! In which case celator, cellator all of a sudden would fit! :)
I've read that those Protoromanian or Vlach cälätors were the
genuine masters of the hidden passes and roads throughout of the
Balcans, a thing relevant even in the contexts of wars in which
the Byzantine Empire and other contemporary powers were implied
more than 1,000 years ago.)

George