Fjäre, Fjære

[ualarauans]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell at ...> wrote:
>
> Feminine on-stem apparently, meaning "shore" or "ebb(tide)" (=OIc.
> fjara) < PG *ferwôn.

*fairwo F.-on – a nice "new" word for Gothic :)

> Well, they're both on the coast, so that makes sense. The question 
is:
> does this Fervir refer to these placenames, and is the any 
possibility
> that the modern placenames arose through a folk-etymological
> reinterpretation of an old tribal name meaning "people", "living
> beings"?

I think fjör and fjara, oblique fjöru, could get in touch with each 
other (semantically) in ON, but perhaps not so easily before /h/ in 
*ferhwa- had been lost. But who can tell for sure? If we had texts 
where (derivatives of) fjara meant "shore people" or something 
similar...

What can convincingly prove that a word underwent a folk-
etymological re-interpretation? Sometimes the word was so strongly 
changed to fit the folk-etymology that the idea is evident: 
marikreitus (< Lat. margarîta) has been clearly re-interpreted as 
having something to do with mari-, marei "sea" (cf. mari-saiws). And 
they went even further in OHG by turning it into merigrioz "sea 
sand". In case of Biblical proper names, we may deduce something 
from their orthography and/or morphology. Examples to illustrate 
this: writing Beþlahaim (twice in Luke) instead of Beþlaihaim may 
hint to a probable re-interpretation of it as containing the 
toponymic element –haim(s). It remains to clarify what Beþla- could 
have stood for. Gen. Iaredis (not *Iaraidis < IARED) and Mattaþiwis 
(along with Mattaþiaus) show that these foreign names were taken up 
as native ones on –reþs and –þius respectively. I wonder if the 
(quasi) first element in Mattaþius* was felt as being the same as in 
Matasuentha (mahti-/mahta- > matta, like in ON)? Haileiins (once) 
vs. Hel- (the rest 19) may or may not be an evidence of its being 
connected with inherited hail-. And so forth.

> Or maybe the tribal name was derived from this word for
> beach: the people who live near the shore. And *then* the question 
is:
> does the poetic word for "men" come from this tribal name, or is 
it a
> separate word derived from the root meaning "life" (in OE and ON) 
or
> "world" (in Gothic)?

The latter looks more plausible to me. Connecting Fervir and 
Fjäre/Fjære is only an (unverifiable?) hypothesis and it can be 
wrong, after all. Maybe Fervir refers to the previous Finnaithae 
meaning something like "people of Finnheden"?

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