Farfalla

[ualarauans]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Fredrik" <gadrauhts at ...> wrote:
>
> Some days ago I was watching the Simpsons when they were in Italy.
> A butterfly flow by and the son of sideshow Bob said: farfalla.
> So I asumed it mean butterfly, which I later confirmed.
> 
> At that time I thought a word like farfalla sounded much similar to
> germanic words and I guess it is a loan from some germanic language.
> Could it be from gothic?
> Or is it so that langobards left some words too and this is from 
them?
> 
> If you think it is gothic, then is the form a change in italian or in
> gothic. I remember a discussion in posy 87-smth and forward about the
> word butterfly and suggestions such as fifal(r)ô came up and also
> faífald(r)ô.
> 
> Here's an idea. Could fifaldrô have become firfaldô > faírfaldô >
> faírfallô > farfalla?

I remember it was you, Fredrik, who pointed out that the word has a 
long [i:] in the first syllable. Long vowels are usually seldom 
reduced or altered, at least not when they are stressed as it should 
have been here. But the "butterfly" shows weird sound changes in the 
languages. To start with, it's unclear whither it was PG *fi:faldo:n 
or *fi:faldro:n or maybe both... And it was occasionally re-shaped 
afterwards to fit the particular idea of what it should mean. German 
Falter gets associated with falten, not with flattern, whatever the 
true etymology is. Look also at ON fi:frildi.

It could be of a speculative interest to see what would become of the 
reconstructed Gothic *feifaldro "butterfly" if we imagine it 
undergoing all the known (known?) historical phonetic transformations 
which affected the early Germanic loanwords in the Romance dialects of 
Italy. What could have happened with the intervocalic -f-? With the
-ldr- cluster? Where the stress would fall?

Could it also be that the "farfalla" was borrowed from some South 
German dialect (*fiefalter, *fiefaller or even *vierfaller)?

Ualarauans





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