A Burgundian regnum existed in southeast France from 436 until 534, the year in which it was integrated into the Merovingian empire of the Franks, where it had an important afterlife as a so called ‘Teilreich’ equipped with its own kings. On the basis of new sources, mostly contemporary personal names, and by means of morphological, phonological and lexical methods, new results concerning the spatial and temporal extension of the Burgundian language can be established. The Burgundians had centers of settlement especially in the rural regions of the Swiss canton Vaud, of the Pays des Dombes near Lyon, and of the Franche Comté. The East Germanic Burgundian language died approximately at the end of the 6th century.
Etymological research informs not only our knowledge of particular languages but also the communities of speakers involved and their history more broadly. While it is generally recognized that historical, cultural and societal events can influence the development of languages, how these factors influence linguistic research and how we think about or perceive particular languages is often overlooked. Certain domains or themes seem especially prone to this effect in Germanic studies, and the treatment of the Germanic element in Italo-Romance is a case in point.
This article presents and discusses four Latin words for which a Germanic etymology is — more or less — accepted. The study begins with the famous ‘elk word’ alcis , ἄλκη, which serves as a template for the analysis of the other three words: socerio, melca and reno . In the case of all four words, the literary transmission overshadows their everyday use and diachronic evolution within Latin. And, while the Germanic origin of alcis is quite obvious, the same clarity does not hold for its counterparts, especially when it comes to the awareness of their users. On balance, none of the four prove to be straightforward examples of loanwords which are smoothly adopted into the Latin language and become integrated into the Romance lexicon in the end. It is the aim of this paper to examine the origins of these words and their pathway into Latin, as well as the interfaces between literary tradition and linguistic use, both before and after the written records.
The Old High German words tegal m. ‘tableware (of clay)’ and tegil m. ‘(melting) pot’ are generally seen as Romance loanwords. In the following it is shown that there is no need for this assumption because on the one hand Old High German tegal has a correspondence in Norn digel (in digel[s]mur ‘hard clayish ground’) and on the other hand the inherited words Icelandic deigla f. ‘(melting) pot’ and dialectal Norwegian deigla ‘id.’ show that a semantic development from ‘tableware (of clay)’ to ‘melting pot’ is possible.
The paper investigates the grammatical means of encoding futurity and modality in Old West Frisian. The analysis, conducted on the archaic text of the Older Skelta Riucht (SkRa), as attested in Codex Unia (U-SkRa), aims at characterising the category of future along the dimensions of temporality and modality. The focus of the study remains specifically on the grammatical marker skela. The study investigates its semantics, typical functions that it served, as well as the linguistic contexts in which it was used. The analysis reveals that skela primarily carries its original modal meanings of obligation, but it occasionally explicitly refers to future events in contexts in which typically the simple present tense forms (futurate presents) appear. In a range of such contexts, characteristic traces of the incipient grammaticalization process can be captured.
The inscription sioag or gaois on the spearhead from Mos is usually understood as Gothic *Gaujis ‘the barker’. There are linguistic difficulties with that interpretation. One can also doubt whether ‘the barker’ really is a suitable name for a weapon. The author suggests that sioag / gaois is an anagram of agiso , corresponding to Old High German agiso ‘fear, terror’. The Gothic counterpart would be *agisa . Thus, there is reason to consider if the language of the inscription is Burgundian, Herulic or West Germanic. There are very few examples of anagrams in older runic inscriptions: lau , lua and aul for alu and Rahswia for haswiaR ‘the grey-haired’. The reason for obscuring *Agisō ‘the terrifying one’ through an anagram could be magical.
This paper advances a recent line of inquiry investigating how loan verbs are assigned argument structure in the replica language and whether lexical copying may effect changes in argument structure. It delineates how Middle English busken ‘prepare’ (< Old Norse reflexivised búa-sk ) is assigned argument structure in the replica language both by copying from the model language and by assignment from near-synonyms in the replica language as a mixed copy. A comparative qualitative corpus study of the structural integration of busken and the diachronic development of its native near-synonyms in Old and Middle English shows how cognacy of linguistic units and structures, and mutual intelligibility between the languages in contact influence the lexical and, more importantly, structural outcomes of contact.
This article presents and discusses four Latin words for which a Germanic etymology is - more or less - accepted. The study begins with the famous 'elk word' alcis, alpha lambda kappa eta, which serves as a template for the analysis of the other three words: socerio, melca and reno. In the case of all four words, the literary transmission overshadows their everyday use and diachronic evolution within Latin. And, while the Germanic origin of alcis is quite obvious, the same clarity does not hold for its counterparts, especially when it comes to the awareness of their users. On balance, none of the four prove to be straightforward examples of loanwords which are smoothly adopted into the Latin language and become integrated into the Romance lexicon in the end. It is the aim of this paper to examine the origins of these words and their pathway into Latin, as well as the interfaces between literary tradition and linguistic use, both before and after the written records.
Etymological research informs not only our knowledge of particular languages but also the communities of speakers involved and their history more broadly. While it is generally recognized that historical, cultural and societal events can influence the development of languages, how these factors influence linguistic research and how we think about or perceive particular languages is often overlooked. Certain domains or themes seem especially prone to this effect in Germanic studies, and the treatment of the Germanic element in Italo-Romance is a case in point.
The Old High German words tegal m. 'tableware (of clay)' and tegil m. '(melting) pot' are generally seen as Romance loanwords. In the following it is shown that there is no need for this assumption because on the one hand Old High German tegal has a correspondence in Norn digel (in digel[s]mur 'hard clayish ground') and on the other hand the inherited words Icelandic deigla f. '(melting) pot' and dialectal Norwegian deigla 'id.' show that a semantic development from 'tableware (of clay)' to 'melting pot' is possible.
A Burgundian regnum existed in southeast France from 436 until 534, the year in which it was integrated into the Merovingian empire of the Franks, where it had an important afterlife as a so called 'Teilreich' equipped with its own kings. On the basis of new sources, mostly contemporary personal names, and by means of morphological, phonological and lexical methods, new results concerning the spatial and temporal extension of the Burgundian language can be established. The Burgundians had centers of settlement especially in the rural regions of the Swiss canton Vaud, of the Pays des Dombes near Lyon, and of the Franche Comt & eacute;. The East Germanic Burgundian language died approximately at the end of the 6th century.
This article explores the influence of Old French terminology on medieval settlement history in the Low Countries, revealing lexical exchanges that disseminated from the bilingual zone in Belgium to the southern Netherlands. It argues that the southern Dutch toponyms saert, triest, and mortel reflect the high medieval dissemination of southern technological and organizational expertise and proposes that feudal officials played a role in introducing Romance onomastic material into the Dutch toponymic landscape.
In several medieval and modern varieties of Gallo-Romance and West Germanic, answers to polar questions may consist of 'yes' or 'no' followed by a personal or demonstrative pronoun with anaphoric reference. This type of answers is typologically rare, which begs the question of its origin and its possible spread via language contact. The present article reviews the dialectal evidence, especially on the Germanic side, discusses the etymology of the anaphoric responsives, and evaluates the possibilty of their contact-induced origin and spread. In passing, I propose a novel etymology for English yes.
I discuss an analysis of changes in the Scandinavian runic alphabet, or futhark, by J & oslash;rgen Rischel (1966). Rischel's article accounts for some puzzling changes in the futhark by employing contrastive feature hierarchies represented as branching trees. Feature hierarchies can be traced back to the work of Roman Jakobson and his colleagues. They enjoyed a brief period of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, but then disappeared from mainstream phonological theory. However, they were employed in a number of interesting studies of Germanic and other languages whose insights we can still profit from today. The goal of this paper is to bring attention to this largely forgotten approach to phonological analysis, and to spell out the principles that underlie it.
This article welcomes the recent proposal of Michael Schulte (2024) for a periodisation of early North Germanic, while pointing out problematic premises and criteria for the delimitation of the proposed subperiods. It is argued that in delimiting linguistic periods there is more to gain than lose for the clarity of scholarly argument if preference is given to linguistic rather than graphemic or socio-cultural criteria, even if it means that reconstructed, rather than ambiguously attested features, are given preference. The relevant chapter of a recent book by Nelson Goering (2023) is also reviewed to cast light on the syncope era. Elements and insights are proposed for a periodisation and labelling of early North Germanic suited for discussion on diachronic structural change.
Research on adverbs of degree in Old and Middle English has been largely self-contained and has paid little attention to developments that were happening in the neighbouring West Germanic languages. While research on these other languages is less extensive, "Middle" Germanic has been identified as a period of convergence for the usage of adverbs of degree (Visser 2023). The present study analyses the usage patterns of seven adverbs in both Old and Middle English using data from different corpora: swioe/swithe, ful, micle/muchel, sare/sore, gearwe/yare, fela/fele, and hearde/harde. It is found that their development differs strikingly from their Continental West Germanic counterparts, and they appear to preserve more primary usage patterns.
Proto-Germanic *daw-ja-, the ultimate source of English to die, is here argued to have originally been a polysemous verb meaning 'to run; to die', corroborating its current etymological analysis as a reflex of the Proto-Indo-European root *dheu- 'to run'. The proposal is supported by both well-known and previously unnoticed reflexes of the verb *daw-ja-in Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Old English, as well as by further Germanic lexical items and figurative expressions. Further support is provided by a series of semantic parallels in several Indo-European traditions, which, together with the Germanic material, reflect a well-known conceptual metaphor rooted in universal human cognition.
When the Etymologisches Worterbuch der friesischen Adjektiva appeared in 2010, the author was well aware that with the complexity of the Frisian linguistic situation and its often unpublished handwritten sources, he would have missed one or two interesting adjectives. Thirteen additional Frisian adjectives have meanwhile been found in other until now less regarded lexicographic material: germ. *au thorn a- 'easy', *ferhwta- 'endowed with a good spirit', *gillja- 'gaping, protruding', *hlaupja- 'unpicking, riving', *krupila- 'crippled', *lega- 'lying', *lunka- 'smirched, blotted', *muka- 'mellow', *slunka- 'of reduced quality', *stamara- 'stammering', *stamma- 'talking inhibited', *straka- 'streched', *sturra- 'stiff, standing off rigidly'. These adjectives will be subjected to an etymological investigation below. This article is the third supplement with such analyses.
