Re: Comparison Þrjótrunn - Icelandic - Latin

Hi!

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
> Henrik Theiling skrev:
>...
> > http://www.kunstsprachen.de/s17/s_01.html#03
> > Comments?
>
> Mjög gaman!  At first I thought "Hey, there *is*
> a Latin word for 'birch'!" but on looking it up
> I found that BETULA/BETULUS (with numerous variants
> in Romance *here* is a loan from Gaulish into
> Latin, so it's actually quite reasonable that
> your 'North Romance' borrowed its word for
> this tree from Germanic.
Exactly.  I had already sound shifted 'betula' when I noticed that it
is unlikely to having been borrowed when the first written appearance
(that we know of) was ~50 BCE.  Probably it was not the most used
word, but birch trees are quite common in the North, therefore, it was
quickly borrowed from the local Germanic word.

>...
> Does the statement "A four cases system is retained"
> apply to the peninsular Scandinavo-Romance languages
> *there* as well?
>...
I don't know, the Institute of Parallel Histories did not send any
reports about that yet, but I think it's unlikely.  *Here*, only few
Germanic and no Romance language have retained it, so I think it's an
uncommon archaic feature.

> If *here* is anuthing to go by one would expect them not to be as
> conservative.
>...
Exactly.

> BTW it would be fun to see what Finnish *there* looks like, with all
> loans from Germanic to Modern Swedish replaced by Scandinavo-Romance
> loans with different degrees of assimilation.
Yes!  That would be very interesting.

> And how does _animal_ become _aðal_?  I can see
> unstressed posttonic _nim_ become _nn_, but whence
> _nn_ > _ð_?
>...
Some words shifted /nm/ > /Dm/.  The /m/ dropped in forms with double
syncope */aDmli/ > /aDli/, simplifying the cluster, and this spread to
the unsyncopated forms, too.

It may well be that there are few (or no?) Germanic word were /nm/ >
/Dm/ happened, since I did not find one with -nVm- in the stem just
now.  (I should have added examples to *every* rule.  Grrrr.)

Anyway, similar effects happened in /nnr/ > /Dr/ (*mannr > maDr) and
maybe in /mn/ > /fn/ (*nemni > nefni).

> But it would become _agnial_ [a'Jal] or _anal_ in R3, so who am I to
> complain!? ;-) (In actual fact _agniáille_ < ANIMALIA or the boring
> _best_ < BESTIA are both more likely.  After all no language is
> likely to tolerate a merger or near merger of the words for 'animal'
> and 'sheep/lamb' -- cf. Gascon were 'rooster' is from VICARIUS
> because GALLUS merged with CATTUS!
Yes, that's a funny one. :-)

I'm also having some problems of this kind with a/o-declension pairs
in Þrjótrunn, e.g. 'filia' vs. 'filius'.  Latin only had to
disambiguate the dat.pl. in -i:s (there is 'filia:bus' for this
reason).  But in Þrjótrunn, many more forms collapse.

Maybe the u-declension, which has a small revival for tree names
(e.g. björk) will take over the function of disambiguating feminines
that are important to be distinguished from the masculine.  However,
the nom.sg. and acc.sg. are identical to 2nd decl. masc. forms, so
this is not too good an idea.  Actually any declension class shift
would leave at least the acc.sg. identical.  So more probably I will
have to use completely different words, but that's a bit unelegant.
Any other ideas?

Ah, and 'cattus' is another Latin loan in Icelandic, so I can quite
safely enter a new word (köttur) into the lexicon. :-)

**Henrik

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