Re: Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "shivkhokra" <shivkhokra@> wrote:
> >
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@> wrote:
> > >
> > > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "shivkhokra" <shivkhokra@> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Can you please explain what do you mean by "fit"?
> > > > What would be a few salient features of Germanic which does not make it "fit"?
> > >
> > > Vocabulary. It is generally reckoned to have a very high proportion of non-IE, or at least, hard to recognise vocabulary.
> > >
> >
> > If we look at some hydronyms of Europe we find in the book
> > "Poland & Germany": Studies Centre on Polish-German Affairs -
> > Poland - Published 1958 on Page 26:
> >
> > "....for water was wudra (cf. Sanskrit udra) and this locution yields
> > the Polish name of Odra for the river Oder.* The word later became woda and a much smaller stream in Pomerania is ..."
>
> What evidence did the politicians provide for that? Do we not have <Adrana> as an old name of the Oder, indicating that the /o/ in <Odra> results from Common Slavic */a/ > /o/, and the name has nothing to do with Skt. <udra>?

Memory failed me. It was the Eder, not the Oder, which was anciently called Adrana (Tac. Ann. 1:56). The old references to the Oder are Odagra/Odogra 892, Odera 940/983, Adora 968, and Oddara/Oddora (Adam of Bremen, ca. 1075). My guess is that -gr- in the oldest is graphy for guttural /r/ by a scribe whose native /r/ was dental. I am not familiar with the evidence mentioned by Piotr for anaptyxis in these forms. At any rate Krahe reconstructed the protoform as *Adara in the most comprehensive presentation of his theory, "Die Struktur der alteur. Hydronomie" (Abh. Akad. Wiss. Mainz, Geistes- und sozialwiss. Kl., Jg. 1962, Nr. 5, 285-342, esp. 305-6). Krahe had some other hydronyms in *-ara, so from his viewpoint no anaptyxis was necessary to derive it from the more common *Adra. In principle the *Ad- could represent either full-grade or zero-grade of *h2ad- or *h4ad-. I suspect that the root is indeed represented in Sanskrit, forming the suppletive inst. pl. <adbhis> and dat./abl. pl. <adbhyas> of <ap-> 'water'. (Or perhaps the suppletion was in the opposite direction, due to bizarre regular forms of a C-stem *ad-?)

I could not access the paper arguing for a Germanic origin of the Oder (within the old post cited by Francesco), but the idea sounds dubious to me, and I think we do have an OEH name. Also, I did not know that Shivkhokra had brought up the same issue 4 years ago, or I would not have bothered with my nickel's worth.

DGK