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.
