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

[Arthur Jones]

Hi Ingemar, other friends,
   
  My apologies first to Ingemar, who misunderstood my last blast about the Swedish "u". In fact, you did a fine job of explaining to non-linguists just how they should approach a somewhat unusual phoneme. Swedish has a way of turning practically every vowel into a diphthong, and complicates matters further by injecting "hidden nasals" into the mix. The closest thing I can compare it with in English is the word "cue" pronounced with a slight hint of nasality. 
   
  Also, I must applaud you for your conclusion that Gothic and Urnorsk were probably closer to Proto-Germanic than their neighbors further South and/or West. Also, one exception may be in Anglo-Saxon, which (in the opinion of several scholars recently) may have entered England much sooner than around the 4th and 5th Centuries AD, but rather about 150-200 AD, hence the apparent closer proximity to Gothic in various ways. This occurred to me also about 43 years ago, when it seemed that Gothic still held some similarities with the Appalachian dialects of American English. Appalachian is noted to reflect rural, isolated speech patterns of England unchanged since Elisabethan times. Could the Goths have been the first Hillbillies? Is this why the prospect of wine, women, song, and gratuitous violence always makes me happy?
   
  Kidding aside, I want to respond to Ualarauans' masterful precision in analyzing my hypothesis that Gothic "kuni qairnus" in the Crimea gave us current "hun-charna". Ualarauans wrote:
   
  "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 to ch before e or i, this e getting opened to a ..."
   
  Right you are! But aside from Slavic, Tatar (Turkic), Turkish (Turkic), and Greek, what other language from a Satem branch could have intervened as the "Trichter" through which those sounds were funneled? The answer might be: Alanic.
  As we know, the Alans were close allies of Ostrogoths, and also filtered heavily through the Crimea and the northern and eastern Pontic regions. They are still found today under the name "Ironi", and live in South Ossetia. Their language is directly descended from Old Persian, albeit with many, many Gothic loan words. 
   
  I believe that Sturla Ellingvag and his DNA testing crew are there even as we speak. 
   
  In any case, could Alanic have turned Kuni-qairnus into Hun-charna? I believe so. If we look at Michael Meier-Bruegger, Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft, 8th Ed., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2002, ISBN 3-11-017243-7, Section L339, at page 130, "Ähnlich wie im Großteil des späteren Lat.+ Roman. ein kw vor e und i palatalisiert wurde, unterliegen satemsprachliche kw-Phoneme sekundären Palatalisationen vor Vorderzungenvokalen. Zu beachten ist, daß auch im Indoiranischen urprüngliches -e die Palatalisierung ihm vorangehender kw- Phoneme bewirkt hat. Uridg. -e ist erst nach diesem Prozeß zu -a geworden."
   
  Then, on page 135, Section L344, the example is given that seems to fit our problem, " Got. qiwans "die lebendigen" -the living- yields Old Persian 
  -chiva- (Old Church Slavonic -zhiv'-). 
   
  Thus, we have an Alanic version or influence yielding the present day Hun-charna.
  Please note that English retains both "quick" and "quirn" from Danish and from Vikings, while also rendering "churn" in good English.
   
  Sorry for the filuwaurdeis.
   
  With kindest regards,
   
  Arthur
   
  

Ingemar Nordgren <ingemar at nordgren.se> wrote:
          Hi Arthur,Francisc, Michael, Michel, Ualarauans and other interested,

I feel that I must point out a circumstance we have not mentioned
until now. '*Kuningaz', '*kunigg' et c. seems in most languages have
been transformed to 'o' like 'konung' or 'ö'(Umlaut) 'König' or 'i'
'king', but also in modern Swedish (and Gutnisk) we have two words -
'konung' and 'kung'. In decided form it is 'kungen'. Konung is a more
formal official title but normally everybody use 'kung'.'Royal',
'Königlich' is in Swedish simply 'kunglig'.In older Sw. there also are
two forms registered, namely 'kunungr' and 'konungr'.In older Danish
it is kunung but now transformed to konge. Hence the original 'u' is
still kept in Swedish, and we as well in Scandinavian languages have
no decided particles before a word, but instead we use endings like in
Gothic.It seems Scandinavian languages are less affected by the
soundshifts than the Continental languages, and accordingly possibly
might be closer to ProtoGmc, and hence also EastGmc.The possible
degree of Celtic influence treated by Michael I can not comment, but
note the parallels of words mentioned by Michael below. Still I would
suggest that the Swedish pronounciation of 'u' could be closest to
Gothic seen in this enlightment, since Gothic/EastGmc evidently (?)
was a result of the soundshift closest to ProtoGmc.

Arthur, I am sorry I do not know how to explain the pronounciation of
Swedish 'u', but I am convinced you can do it much better since you
actually speak Swedish and many other languages, and have studied
Germanistics in Europe. Note however that Danes have a 'u' closer to
English and the Continent, while Norwegian pronounciation is closer to
Swedish. You are a valuable asset to the list.

Best wishes!
Ingemar

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Michael Erwin <merwin at ...> wrote:
>
> I still think 'king' comes from 'kin' or 'kuni' for the Gothic.
> 
> Of course one C-Gmc root can yield two Gothic words, as with mawi and 
> magatha, (or two English words, as with churn and quern, shirt and 
> skirt, ship and skiff, etc.) so that kindins and *kunig-- might come 
> from the same root. IIRC, mawi and magatha reflect changing word- 
> formation patterns within C-Gmc and Gothic, while shirt and skirt 
> reflect internal borrowing among Germanic languages.
>



         


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