From: dgkilday57
Message: 71182
Date: 2013-04-10
>The relevant material by Schlutter is in Anglia 30(N.F. 18):248-9, 1907. OE _wraettere:ad_ is identical to NHG (Bavaria, Wetterau) _ritzerot_. The OE simplex is _wraette_ wk. f. (var. _wraet_ st. m.) 'Rubea tinctoria, or red dye obtained from it'. The OHG counterpart is _rezza_ glossed 'coccinum', 'coccum', 'murex', etc. The Gmc. protoform *wratja- corresponds exactly to *wrodja:, the Italic protoform of Sabine *rosa:, borrowed into Latin as _rosa_ after inherited *-s- had already been rhotacized (ca. 350 BCE).
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> Sumerian _urud_ 'copper' (the -u is the Akkadian nominative suffix from glossaries) is in my opinion borrowed from Balkano-Danubian *wrod- 'red', cognate with PIE *h1r(e)udH-. We are not talking about a specialized color like mauve or taupe. All of us have cut ourselves and seen blood, and we label it red.
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> "Balkano-Danubian" is what I used to call "West Pontic" until I found that other mid-rangers had already used "Pontic" in a different sense. The borrowings of *wrod- into IE lgs. mostly mean 'rose', but I suspect BD-speakers in the Balkan area also used it for 'native copper, mountain copper, orichalcum'. The oronym Rhodope/Rodopi has resisted plausible etymology since the range is hardly 'rose-faced'; more likely it is practically equivalent to 'Erzgebirge'.
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> To the northwest, *wrod- in the sense 'red pigment, red dye' appears to have yielded some obscure OE and OHG glossary words (discussed in papers by O.B. Schlutter which I do not have handy) and survives in the first element of HG _ritzerot_ 'intensely red', which is to be understood as 'red pigment-red, as red as red pigment'. (The usual explanation labels this along with _gritzegrau_ and _blitzeblau_ as expressive formations. In my opinion _ritzerot_ is an etymological compound and provided the model for the others, which are analogical rather than expressive.)