Was the word "kunig/kunigas/kunigur" a gothic word?

[ualarauans]

Hi Arthur

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Arthur Jones <arthurobin2002 at ...> 
wrote:
>
>    I still favour Canigo as a slight corruption of Kuni-hauhs for 
several small
> factors we haven't yet discussed:
> 
>    1. Several place names in the Crimea that are Gothic in origin, 
but were
> metabolized into Tatar, including "Gun-charna", now 
pronounced "Hun-charna",
> which has no possible Slavic contaminants. It originated as Gothic
> "Kuni-qairnus", or "Tribal Mill" (see Wulfilan "asilu-qairnus", 
or "donkey
> mill").
> It also has nothing to do with Hunnic ancestry, as the Huns fought
> continuously against Crimean Goths, but were unable to penetrate 
or settle
> deeply into the Crimea (even if such had been their primary 
intention!). The
> "qairnus" word appears elsewhere in Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria 
(Kvarna). It is
> an early version of Swedish "kvarna", English "churn", and other 
Germanic
> _karne-_ derivatives such as "Karnemelk".

The IE-inherited Slavic word cognate to Go. qairnus is OCSl. zhriny 
(Gen. zhrinuve) meaning the same. But if we suppose a borrowing of 
Go. qairnus into Slavic (as a toponymic element) around the 4th ct. 
and subject it to the phonetic changes which affected the proto-
Slavic afterwards (a very entertaining procedure, I must say), the 
1st palatalization in this case, we most likely get something like 
*chrinu (/ch/ like in "church", /ri/ is vocalic [r], /u/ is a 
reduced one) masculine or *chrina feminine for Old Church Slavonic, 
and that would formally coincide with the indigenous word 
for "black" which yielded *chornyj M., *chorna F. respectively in 
today's Ukrainian. I suppose there's a lot of placenames in the 
Ukraine containing this element (Chornobyl', Russian Chernobyl' 
among others). Theoretically, some of them could be folk-
etymologized qairnus-names left of the Ostrogoths, but that is of 
course a pure speculation.

But the Slavs were relatively late to come into the Crimea. The 
suggested development qairnus > -charna must have taken place in 
some other language. This language must simplify [kw] > [k] and then 
palatalize k > ch before [e], [i], this [e] getting opened to [a] 
before affricates (???). Could Crimean Gothic bear either of these 
features? Tatarian? Does Gun-/Hun-charna mean something in Turkic?

Ualarauans





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