Re: intrinsically dead character of Livagian

At 01:41 09.4.2000 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > Is Nibboan a lineal descendant of Livagian?
>
>That's a matter of debate. My own view is that Livagian is a sanskrit to
>Nibboan's prakrit, so they both descend from an ancestral 'Vedic'. But
>Livagian has repeatedly had a massive superstrate influence on Nibboan,
>to the extent that Nibboan could be seen as having repeatedly been
>reborn as a Livagian-based creole.
That's exactly what's always been going on in Indo-Aryan too: words have
been borrowed from Sanskrit, coexisting with inherited cognates, then been
affected by later sound-changes, then been re-borrowed from Sanskrit.  A
bit like the French (or Frenchified English!) situation with forms like
_loyal_ and _legal_ existing side-by-side.

> > Hope you think my Icelandicization of the toponym is in order,
> > BTW.  _Eyjar_ (ON ['øyjar] ModIc ['Eijar]) is "islands"; cf. _Orkneyjar_
> > (_orkn_ = "killer whale", no less!)
>
>Neat. So it's a kind of folk-etymological blend? I presume Norwegians sailed
>on to Livagia on their voyages past Ireland and Biscay, and that that is the
>source of the Norse name. Iceland is further from Scandinavia than Livagia
>is from Ireland. (Liv is S of Iceland, W of Brittany.) The question then is
>whether ['lyhaag] ~ ['lyxaag] would naturally yield Norse _Lífeyjar .
>
>English _Lifay_ looks to me more as though it's come from _Livagia_ than
Exactly.  In Real World terms the ON/Icelandic term is of course an
adaptation of _Lifay_, but you should be aware that post-vocalic _f_
denotes [v] in ON/Icelandic orthography, so that in That World terms
_Lífeyjar_ is a plausible folk-etymological rendering of Latin _Livagia_,
cf. the inverse case of _Malmö_ < _Malmey_/_Malmøy_ being Latinized
_Malmogia_!  In modern Icelandic _-Vgi_ is [VjI], so the connexion of
_VgiV_ and _VjV_ is a quite natural one.  Cf. also _Svéariki_ > _Sverige_ >
['svErj@] "Sweden"!




/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto:bpj@...>bpj@netg.se
<mailto:melroch@...>melroch@my-deja.com
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