[gothic-l] Eruli: The IE Etymology IX

[Bertil Haggman]

"2) An etymological connection with a supposed IE root *er- 'man,
masculine', especially in names of young and male animals. The
animals involved are Norw. jerv 'wolverine'; OHG irah 'male goat';
Grk. eriphos 'young male goat', Lat. aries 'ram'; and Olc. orri, OHG
orrehuon, 'Auerhahn'; the 'Auerhahn' words are examples of an
extended stem *ers attested also in Avestan arsan 'man, male
animal', Attic arraen, Homeric arsaen, 'masculine'. The youth element
was supported by ernos, 'scion', the Heysychios gloss ereas tekna and
Neo-Phrygian eiroi 'children'. From the beginning this argument
suffered from confusion about the relative importance of the semantic
elements 'youth' and 'maleness' in the reconstructed root; few of the
supposed cognates attest both together. Bugge, for example, ety-
mologized  jerv as 'young male animal' while Falk-Torp preferred
simply 'das Junge'. Bugge postulated a Germanic god *Er 'the
male' and...Elgqvist produced a logical combination of these two
ideas: the term erilaR, referring to the rune-carver in his religious
function, would have meant 'the little man', i.e. the priest as repre-
sentative of his god *Er- 'the man'. This is fantasy, based on a recon-
struction which had long since been abandoned at the time Elgqvist wrote).
Still more destructive to the 'male' hypothesis was the emergence of
new etymologies for many of the words involved: jerv is now thought
to mean 'brown animal', irah to be a loan from Latin hircus, and
eraephos and aries to be from the root for 'goat' or 'horned animal'
unrelated to the rest..."

Erulically

Bertil


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