5 posts tagged “germanic”

About a week ago, I was telling my mother about that mysterious word *ulkʷos and its odd reflexes in the Indo-European languages in general, and Germanic languages especially.

She kindly pointed out to me that there aren't that many words in Dutch that end in -olf. And in fact there aren't even many word that end in -lf either. I compiled a list, which I expect to be near-complete list of non-compounds nouns that end in -lf.

I also looked for some words that would maybe display an alternation between -lf and -lk, which wasn't quite as successful. But l'll post the results and the etymologies of these words.

• kolf 'backside of a rifle'
  
• golf 'wave'
  
• kalf 'calf' ??
  
• half 'half'
  
• zalf 'salve' ?
  
• zelf 'self'
  
• elf 'eleven' (and also twaalf 'twelve')
  
• delven 'to delve'
  
• welven 'to gulf'
  

I'll discuss these words individually

kolf
I'm not sure what the etymology of this word is. These days it's the backside of a rifle the Middle Dutch meaning was 'stick, club, bat'. etymonline suggests a root *kulþ-. But I'm not sure how to get the f  out of that word, Dutch tends to change f's to ch, but doesn't get f's from þ (see luft > lucht. graft > gracht kraft > kracht).

golf
golf < French golfe < Italian golfo < late Latin colpus <Greek κολπος
So not a Germanic origin.

kalf
kalf < PGm. *kalbaz
Gothic has kalbo which is a *eh2-feminine stem of a root *kalb- it also means 'female calf'.
It is sometimes connected with PIE *gelb(h)- from a root *gel- 'to swell' , the swelling of an animal womb. I don't find this explanation particularly compelling. either way it's not important for the comparison to 'wolf'.

half
half < PGm *halbaz
It's connected with the Indo-European root *(s)kel- 'to split'. Quite convincing, Also 'scalp' is related to this word (this time with the presence of the s-mobile).

It's interesting to see scalp have a *p-suffix and half have a *b-suffix. the actually reason for this is really difficult to trace though. We'd obviously like to connect the two, but there's no real reason fur us to do so except for 'they sound alike and related words use them'.

zalf
From a Indo-European root *selp- 'butter, fat'.

zelf
From proto-Germanic selbaz 'self' from Indo-European *sel-bho- from the base *s(w)e- "separate, apart" is wat www.etymonline.com says, makes you wonder what this -l root suffix is though. Or the bho part, I myself am not sure.

elf
From Proto-Germanic *ain-lif. litterarely one-leave. The leaving part from PGm. laibijan 'to cause to remain/to leave' from PIE root *leikʷ- There we have one! A *kʷ > *p /R_. Where R = i,l (and likely then also u,r).

delven
Apparently from an Indo-European root *dhelbh- 'to dig'.

welven
From PGm. *hwelban From Indo-European *kʷelp- To wich also Gk. κολπος is directly related.

So now we have two words!  *leikʷ- and *ulkʷo- Which have a *kʷ > *p shift. Both in a similar environment.

We can hardly draw conclusions from this, but it was definitely worth checking out the -lf words, and seeing which words have a *kʷ > *p shift.

My next post, I'll work the other way around, and I'll look for roots that have *kʷ/*p switches.

I promised a while ago that I'd be writing down the phonology of Hittite on this blog. I am still at it, it's turning out to be enormous. But please be patient, while you wait I'll have some musings on the origin of the Indo-European wolf.

Wolf is a very odd word, because finding the 'right' root is actually far more difficult than you'd think. Traditionally we reconstruct *ul̥kʷos (*l is vocalised, your fonts may not place the vocalisation circle correctly.)

But normally we'd expect the reflex of *kʷ in Proto-Germanic to be *ƕ [ʍ] or the Verner variant *gʷ, not *f as seen in English, German and Dutch Wolf. *f can only come from PIE *p. To explain this odd switch between *kʷ and *p some people have proposed a sound law like the following:

*kʷ  > *p /R̥_ Or: *kʷ becomes *p after a vocalised resonant. Other such ad hoc explanations could be found, to explain the shift, simply because the environment is quite rare. I for one, would not know any other root with the same environment. Since there's no real way to disprove or approve such a law, we should be careful with accepting it.

But we haven't run out of odd Germanic cognates yet. We also have the word whelp. Arguably this word could be completely unrelated, but the build up is rather similar. Cognates to this word are O.S. hwelp, O.N. hvelpr, Du. welp, Ger. hwelf

A proto-Germanic form of this word would be expected to be *ƕelpaz. The most natural reconstruction of this word in PIE would then be *kʷélbos. Bizarre, I know but the similarity in root is striking. But the Indo-European word has a *b, which immediately makes it suspect. It looks like whelp actually developed in Proto-Germanic rather than Indo-European.

Proto-Germanic form of wolf is *wulfaz. *ƕelpaz looks as if the *w devoiced, and the  *f hardened. Besides that  the root has e-grade instead of Ø-grade. There really is no proper way to explain such changes, and maybe I'm completely wrong in assuming a relation between the two. But it's worth mentioning in this blog entry about the word wolf. Some propose the word to be onomatopoeic, but the same could be said for the Indo-European word for wolf.

There's one more very odd word ON. Vargr 'Outlaw, Wolf', but ModIc Vargur means 'fox', the Old English word is Warg, and referred to a particularly evil kind of wolf.

This word, if related to the above cited root for wolf, has also gone through some very odd sound changes. The hypothatical proto-Germanic form would be **wargʷaz
First of all, it seems to have a a-grade in the root. Then there's the *g which is a Verner variant of *ƕ. This would then mean at some point the accent would have been on the last syllable at some point. In PIE we'd expect *uolkʷós. Another odd thing is of course the *r rather than the *l. But this shouldn't surprise us too much, r/l switching is a 'common' sporadic shift.

I suggest we now leave the confusing  bunch of words that we know as the Germanic wolf-words and focus on some other languages.

First Greek. In Greek we find the word λὐκος. I can see you guys frowning! That's right, the *l and *u switched places, besides that this word reconstucts perfectly fine: PIE *lukʷos. This is not a normal process, not in Greek not in any language. Greek is known for its funky metathesis though (compare γυμνος to 'naked'), but even for Metathesis-happy Greek this metathesis is very funky.

There is a possibility that the word λὐκος comes straight from *ul̥kʷos though. One could assume a Proto-Greek form *ϝλάϙος /wlákʷos/ after which the labial element influenced the ά to colour to ὐ. Not something intirely dissimilar happens to κὐκλος <*kʷékʷlos where the é is influenced by the labial element. We have no indication though, that this happens to *a as well, and even less evidence that this labial-colouring occurred after the appearance of a through the vocalisation of the *l and in fact that seems fairly unlikely to me.

Let's take another word! Latin this time, lupus. Again a *lu- variant rather than *ul-. Interesting back in the days that people suggested that Latin and Greek may have been closely linked, but by now we know this isn't at all the case, which makes it all the more puzzling. I don't know much of Latin but lupus seems to only be able to go back to *lupos. Both the *p variant and the *lu variant in one word! Can it get any crazier? No it can't, and that's why we're now going to discuss Sanskrit!

Sanskrit has वृकः vṛkaḥ. Wow that one goes right back to *ulkʷos! Coincidence? I think not. This is yet another example of the shameless Sanskrit-centricity in almost anything we reconstruct in Indo-European. Something we should discourage. How is it that of the Major branches only this branch truly displays *ulkʷos and therefore, for some reason gets a more important status than the rest? Just because Sanskrit has a lot of archaisms, we can not just assume every word that's different from the rest is an archaism.  But okay enough venting of frustrations on Sanskrit-centricity (Hah! how's that for a neologism!).

So, now having discussed several appearances of the word 'wolf' what kind of conclusions are we going to draw from this? In fact I could still continue for example, telling about the seemingly similar root for 'fox' and also 'lynx' which looks like an n-infixed form of lycos. But that would make this entry even bigger than it already is, so I might discuss that some other time.

There's quite a few things we could come up with, and none of them are absolutely convincing. But let me mention just a few ideas worth mentioning

I'm not a great fan of Pokorny, and in my humble opinion, no one should be one. But he does have quite a nice explanation for this word. He proposes that the root *uelkʷ- is somehow related to the verbal root *uelp- 'to yelp', howl etc. This is in fact quite interesting, it would explain the seemingly random *kʷ/p alternations. I don't know of any other roots, but I do know it's not uncommon that *kʷ alternates with *p. Why this is, is absolutely beyond me. But it does give some nice options. Though it leaves the *lu~ul  metathesis unexplained.

Other explanations would say that the 'fear' for such wild animals as wolves would give birth to Taboo words, explaining the odd root formations. I find this absolutely implausible. Simply because such metatheses as *lu~ul are much to 'subtile'. When we see words being inverted, as for example in verlan, we see that this is not done per phoneme but often per syllable. It's not very likely that this is truly a taboo formation.

Another theory, which I've been theorising myself (although undoubtedly other people thought of it too) is the following.
Obviously what we know as Proto-Indo-European was not a sole linguistic entity in the area. It's likely there were other languages, and not just other language families, but sister languages of Indo-European itself too. Similar to how Dutch is a sister language to English. If countless languages develop from English and thus becomes the proto-language of a new family tree, while Dutch dies out, it doesn't mean Dutch never existed. Loan words from other such Indo-Europaic languages are not at all unlikely. Nor is it unlikely that such a sister language had a shift like **kʷ>**p. Did we loan the word for wolf from one of these sister languages? We can never be sure.

We could also explain the *lu- variants with this. In one of these sister languages, it's not at all unlikely that a vocalic *l  developed to *lu giving a **wlu-like cluster. I find it unlikely any language would retain a horrible cluster like **wl- which would lead to the disappearance of **w.

It is then absolutely possible to imagine sister languages with realistic sound shifts giving the results Indo-European has. But what would be the reason for taking over the word for wolf from these odd people? Why not keep our own?

Another idea might be that there was a substrate language, maybe even something Finno-Ugric, without the phoneme *kʷ, making it *p by sound substitution. Similarly a vocalic *l is easily pronounced *lu when said language has no such thing as vocalic consonants. But once again, why did a substrate language have such great influence on a word that doesn't have little importance within one's basic vocabulary of a prehistoric culture?

All very nice ideas very little conclusions. Feel free to add any idea's, no matter how crazy, I'm interested in what you think.

DISCLAIMER
I'd just like to thank Glen Gordon for making me realise that of course there must have been Indo-Europaic languages around Proto-Indo-European, and not just languages of other languages families. This possibility never occurred to me before, while it's actually so obvious.

For this special day, I have a lovely thematised blog update. In Dutch we call Christmas 'kerst' or 'kerstmis'. Which is odd, to say the least. After all Jezus' name was Jezus Christ, not Jezus Kerst/Chirst/Cherst. The second part comes from the Greek word χριστος 'anointed one'.

Dutch seems to have metathesised the vowel and the /r/. Also there has been a slight change in vowel, but this is understandable in a loaning of a foreign word.

Metathesis of /r/ is not an uncommon feature in Germanic, but it's especially productive (as far as a sporadic sound change is productive) in English.

Some examples are:
brid > bird
hros > horse (Du. ros)

I've told before about how Germanic seems to enjoy metathesising resonants all the time. I had an idea it might be some kind of cultural linguistic game, although a fun idea to sport, probably not very feasible. Nevertheless, this tendency of metathesis is a fun thing to keep in mind.

Dutch though, tends to avoid such very late resonant metathesis, and then it happened in such a (in those time anyway) essential word as Christmas.

This suddenly popped into my mind this morning after having gone to a party which lasted from 23.00 until 07.00. Comparative linguistics is a curse that will haunt you forever, even at times you'd rather be sleeping it will wake you up and tell you about such words as 'kerst'. And I'm still haunted by it because I can not explain the metathesis.

Today I'll, for the first time in this blog, dedicate an entry to my Mother tongue. Of course I wouldn't ever do that if it didn't have any philological worth, so I will be discussing Old Dutch rather than modern Dutch.

Hebban Olla Vogala is often, falsely called 'the first Dutch text'. It is in a way the first Dutch text which has some literary value, although it's but a scribble to try out one's pen or a Probatio Pannae the text is as follows:

Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic andu thu. Uuat unbidan uue nu?
Which roughly translates to:
Have all birds begun nests except me and you. What are we waiting for?

Assuming that this text is in fact a Dutch text (it has been argued that this is in fact an Old English text), there are some striking things about this text which I wouldn't want to keep from you.

First it's the personal pronoun 'I' written hic. This spelling is one of the major reasons why we think that it might be a southern Dutch text (Flemish dialect).

The Dutch first person pronoun has been 'ik' for a very long time. It's been spelled ic, ick etc. But has always been /ik/. Therefore it's odd that one would write an h in front of this word. hic is a form that is quite commonly seen in Flemish scriptures in Middle Dutch, along side other words getting an h that it should have.

This is becomes Flemish lost its word initial h. This is a tendency which is still seen today. Where I come from people still say ebbe rather than hebben. In Middle Dutch times, the different Dutch speaking peoples were clearly aware of different dialectal regions. Therefore Flemish writers would often write an h in the place they new where it was present in other dialects. But very often, due to hypercorrection this h would show up in all sorts of words which are not supposed to have it. This looks exactly like such an instance.

But what is fascinating about this hypercorrection that we're no talking Middle Dutch  here but Old Dutch. Old Dutch was a language which has next to no written attestations, and was not really used as a written language except for Probatio Pennae and glosses of Latin texts. But a hypercorrection of hic, clearly points towards to some kind of uniformity of spelling of Dutch, which our anonymous poet was trying to conform to.

This truly goes against our expectations of the state of the Old Dutch language as a written one. If the person was truly a Flemish speaking writer we'd expect the text to be:
Ebban olla vogala nestas agunnan inase ic andu thu. Uuat unbidan uue nu?

It's quite mysterious. It, in my opinion, indicates that there may have been a more lively written tradition of Old Dutch then we currently think.

Another interesting thing I'd like to touch upon is another personal pronoun thu. This clearly is the reflex of the Proto-Germanic *þū as still seen today in the German du.

This is not the word we find in our modern speech. These days we have jij  which is actually a palatalised form of gij. Palatalisation in Dutch?! Yes, it's very rare, but it happens if there's enough North-Sea Germanic influence which did palatalise consonants.

But back to thu. It's interesting to see that Old Dutch still had þ, or maybe ð as a phoneme which becomes d in Middle Dutch. It's especially odd, because the German shift þ>d is often placed around the 6th/7th Century, and you'd expect the Dutch development to be part of that same wave (after all Old Dutch/Old Saxon/Old High German form quite a linear Dialect Continuum.) Apparently þ > d was then a later development in Dutch.

That's all for now, I hoe you enjoyed this little bit of insight into the Old Dutch language.

Today, a bit later than planned, I will write another update. This time it won't be specifically about the translation of a certain text, but I'll show some stuff about my own language, Dutch, and some thoughts on etymology.

First of all a translation of the title:

Ook dat nog!

Which literally translates to: also that still!
Which is a rather odd construction which I can not fully explain, but the more natural translation would be `that's just great'.

It would be used in the context like this:

Imagine yourself working on a paper all night, and you suddenly find out you were supposed to also (the ook part) finish another paper. That's the moment you'd say `ook dat nog!'.

Ook is an interesting word. It would mean something as `as well, too, also'. I started wondering about it's etymology, and my first instinct said. it must be related to the Latin suffix -que, Gothic suffix -uh, which both mean `and'. -que is suffixed to the last word of an and-construction. Like: senatus populusque romanus `senate and people of Rome'.

-que goes back to PIE *kʷe. Tracing this to gothic, by applying Grimm's law you'd get **-ƕe. Supposing it's unstressed position cause it to lost the last vowel, you'd get a form like **-h (ƕ word-finally becomes h, saƕan > sah). Since -h is difficult to pronounce, especially after a consonant, you'd expect an epenthetic vowel. resulting in the attested form -uh. One can't help but think that this looks an awful lot like german `auch' (same meaning as Dutch ook).

Now there is one enormous problem in this supposed etymology. The k in ook would not be explained. If auch comes from a proto germanic -h. Then also Dutch would have a -ch. Now it just seems that the German version is from an original -k that underwent  the High German Sound shift. And there is no way that PWGm. *k comes from PIE *kʷ.

Now there's only one way out of this mess, and that's saying that the -k in Dutch might be dialectal or from Frisian. I'm not sure if it would work for Frisian, since I'm not well known with the language. But taking a look at the Woordenboek Der Nederlandse Taal (Dictionary of the Dutch language) quickly killed all my hope.

voegw. en bijw. Got. auk, ohd. ouh, auh, mhd. ouch, nhd. auch, ags. eác, eng. (verouderd) eke (zie nog andere vormen bij MURRAY 3, 66 c), on. auk, os. ôk, mnl. oec. De oorsprong van deze algemeen Germaansche partikel is niet met zekerheid te bepalen. Gewoonlijk brengt men ze in verband met den wortel auk-, vermeerderen, waarvan got.aukan, ohd. ouhhôn, ags. eácian, on. auka, os. ôkjan, mul. ooken (verg. ook nog FRANCK, Elym. Wdb.).

I don't feel much for give a word per word translation of this entry. But what anyone should note, is that Gothic actually already has a word for `ook' being `auk'. Which quickly kills of my fantasies of it being related to Gothic suffix -uh.

Another thing that is stated, that the origins of this particle are unclear, generally it is connected with the germanic root *auk-  which mean `to add'.

Now you see, how some, `blatantly clear' etymologies can actually be wrong as well. Oh well, it was a fun thought experiment.