Re: Comparison Þrjótrunn - Icelandic - Latin

Sorry for late reply.  I had saved the mail
as a draft instead of sending it off!

Henricus Theillinus scripsit:

> 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.
No matter when BETULA is attested, it is unlikely that
the Germanic-substrate Romance *there* would use a
Gaulish loan-word.

I must remember to have the Slavic word for 'birch'
in Slvanjek.  BTW how do you handle the points of the
compass, where Romance *here* uses Germanic loans?
I used Slavic loans in Slvanjek.  (However the
problem in the Þrjótrunn universe is rather what
the South Romance languages *there* use.  Italian
has the alternatives _levante_, _ponente_ and
_messogiorno(*)_, but I don't know if there is
any alternative for 'north'.

(* Curiously _mezzogiorno_ shows the same semantic
development as Latin _meridies_, but was compounded
anew from the Romance words for 'mid-day'.  Apparently
_meridies_ remained transparent in spite of the odd
*d > r dissmilation.)

>
>> 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).
Yes, I knew about *nnr > Dr, but have missed *nm > *Dm,
though I guess English _fathom_ and Icelandic _faðm_
against Swedish _famn_ may be an instance.

As for *mn it first merged with */bn/ and then became [vn]
along with it, or in the light of Icelandic [nab_0n] the
[B] never became labiodental in this combo in that language.
BTW the spelling _napn_ occurs in Old Swedish in spite of
modern Swedish _namn_ and Danish _navn_, so clearly we have
an archiphoneme here!

>> 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!
In fact, in the light of French _âme_ < ANIMA, N'M became _mm_
rather than _nn_ in Vulgar Latin, so R3 should have _amu > amo_
(with the plural _emu > eme_ by analogy), or _amaille_ with the
analogical plural _ameill > amaill_.  Apparently R3 will have
a number of feminines where the numbers are distinguished only
by the 'loss' of _-e_ in the plural, which also means that some
feminine plurals will look like the corresponding masculine singular.

> 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.
Perhaps 'daughter' is from FILIOLA while 'son' is from
FILIUS.  BTW have a look at 'Knabe' and 'Mädchen' in the
all too scanty German-Romance index at the end of Meyer-
Lübke's dictionary.

> 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?
It is notable that Romance languages where -a was
preserved felt the need for other feminine-deriving
suffixes. Italian has several feminine-deriving
suffixes -- notably _-ina_ which is similar to
Icelandic _-ynja_ in _Ásynja_ and _apynja_. The
latter was borrowed into Finnish as _apina_, so
probably there was an *-ina variant in Old
Scandinavian too.  In fact _-ina_ had some
productivity in Classical Latin when deriving
feminines from masculines in -A (AGRIPPINA
the younger being most notorious, apparently
responsible for messing up her son Nero!)
I don't know if it was used for common nouns
like AGRICOLA.  I guess we'll have to ask Ray
when he gets back!

> Ah, and 'cattus' is another Latin loan in Icelandic, so I can quite
> safely enter a new word (köttur) into the lexicon. :-)
Shouldn't it be _kattur_, as there is no reason to
suppose it became a u-stem in Northern Romance *there*?

> **Henrik
MALEDICTVS GOTHVS

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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