Re: German "kein" "no, no one"

---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <grzegorj2000@...> wrote:



Does anybody know a convincing etymology of German kein "no ..."?

 

The "official" etymology (cf. Kluge etc.) says that this form comes from Old High German nihhein (nechein, etc.) by throwing out ni- (= IE *ne "not") and "Verhärtung" ("hardening") of the -ch- in the initial position. Middle High German knew also "kein" with the positive meaning "irgendein" (any).

 

As for now, all is clear. The Proto-German (older than the 2nd consonantal shift) was *ni-kein obviously. But what is its earlier source?

 

Kluge links it with Goth. nih "and not" = Latin neque. However, how the Germanic *h (= IE *k) could have yielded German (pre-second shift) k (= IE *g)?

 

Another possible link, to Old Saxon nege^n and Dutch geen "no... " is also suspected. Why -g- in OS and Dutch but -k- in German? Even if we supposed that we have a rare example of g > k second consonantal shift in anlaut, there is no way to explain the internal OS -g- (in nege^n) and OHG -ch- (in nechein).

 

 

I have a personal hypothesis concerning these forms, and I expect some comments on it. Perhaps no one has observed so far that an intriguingly similar form is Polish "żaden" "no..." (= Germ. kein). There are attestations of 14th-16th centuries in the form "niżadny" etc. (with negative ni-), then this negative particle was thown away, and hence modern "żaden". According to Boryś (Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego, 2005), the word under question is West Slavic only (with some East Slavic forms which could be interdialectal borrowings). Its protoform could be *ni-z^e-edi^nu^ in Proto-Slavic.

 

Now my own scenario. I assume that both forms, German and West Slavic, are similarly built. The first element, Slavic *ni and Germanic *ne, could be even the same word (the Slavic *ni < IE *ne ei, reduced to *ne in German) or in German there is not the second IE part, the particle *ei, in this word.

 

The second part is the IE particle *ge. It can be seen, among others, in Germanic *mi-k (accusative "me"). It yielded *z^e in Slavic regularly.

 

The third part is the numeral "1". It is *aina- in Germanic (> ein in German) from IE *oino- but *ed(h)-oino- in Slavic.

 

So, the common IE protoform could be *ne-(ei)-ge-oino- in both German and West Slavic. It yielded *ne-k-aina- in Proto-Germanic, and *ni-z^e-inu^, further *ni-z^e-ed-inu^ in Slavic.

 

What concerns inu^ / edinu^: It is noticeable that while the original *oino- > in- is also preserved with the meaning "1" in SCS inorogu^ "unicorn", it has a new meaning "other" in other instances. When the new meaning had developed, the old *ino-rogu^ was replaced by *edino-rogu^ (cf. modern jednorożec "unicorn" in Polish). So, the assumed *ni-z^e-inu^ could also have been replaced by *ni-z^e-ed-inu^ in the exacly  the same way as inorogu^ by *edinorogu^.

 

Germanic *nekaina- only survived in Old High German as *nekein

> nechein (2nd shift). In Slavic, the assumed *ni-z^e-ed-inu^ yielded

*niz^e^di^nu^ (with e+e > e^ "jat'"). The group z^ + e^ > z^a probably regularly in Slavic (counterexamples may be all caused by analogy).

 

Originally there also existed a form without negation, *ge-oino-. While there are no any traces of it in Slavic, it survived as kein "irgendein" in MHG but disappeared soon. The initial negation was dropped in both German and West Slavic, except some old Polish attestations. It is nothing strange in it, but "ne" was similarly dropped in English and German development (German "ich ne spreche" was replaced by "ich ne spreche nicht" and then by the modern form "ich spreche nicht"). Omitting of negation in Slavic is rare but just attested in this very word, so it is out of question.

 

And what with Dutch geen and Old Saxon nege^n? They do not fit "kein" phonetically, so they are not directly related, even if constructed similarly. Perhaps -g- comes from IE *ghe, another particle with similar meaning. And perhaps they come from Pre-Verner Germanic *ne-h-aina-, with ne-h- = Latin neque, like Kluge suggests.