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

[ualarauans]

Hi Arthur,

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Arthur Jones <arthurobin2002 at ...> 
wrote:
>
> <...>
> 
>    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 ..."

With a correction "[e] getting opened to [a] AFTER affricates" (was 
erroneously BEFORE). At first, I was thinking of OCSl. 
charu "witchcraft" which evolved from PIE *kwer- (Pokorny, I, 641-
642). We can observe all the said processes here. But when standing 
before another consonant (like in qairnus), this [er] would yield a 
vocalic [r] (written as /ri/) instead, and that would give us OCSl. 
chrinu as I told, a word meaning "black". This development was 
exclusively Slavic, caused by the Law of Open Syllables, and it 
didn't affect other IE languages.

>    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.

Iraettae (pl. of Iron "Ossetian") live in North Ossetia as well. 
Their federal republic is officially called Alania nowadays.

>    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."

I'm struck by the likeness of the descriptions! Thanks for this! But 
we probably should bear in mind that, according to your hypothesis, 
the word was not native in Alanian, but borrowed from Gothic, and 
borrowed not earlier than 250 AD (supposed year of the Goths 
invading the Crimea). Thus, it could not have gone through all the 
phonetic perturbation which affected Alanian words inherited from 
PIE. To positively answer to the question whether qairnus could 
yield charna on the North Iranian soil, the Alanian palatalization 
and the consequent change [e] > [a] must be dated later than the 
period of the Gotho-Alanian contact. Are they? We urgently need an 
Iranianist!

>    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.

Filuwaurdei Theina maist wailaqumana ist!

>    With kindest regards,
> 
>    Arthur

Ualarauans






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