LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.25 (01) [E/German]

Wed Aug 25 14:45:36 UTC 2004

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From: john feather <johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Etymology

Fred wrote: > ten allen tijde = alwaeys

>Deze uitdrukking schijnt gespeld te moeten worden als: "te allen tijden",
dus zonder de 'n' achter te. De schrijfwijze komt voort uit lang vergeten
naamvallen. Misschien dat anderen van de lijst weten hoe dat zo komt.

>The correct spelling seems to be: "te allen tijden" It must have something
to do with long forgotten cases. Perhaps someone else of the list knows why
this spelling is correct.<

I did a search using AltaVista set to Worldwide and All Languages with the
following expressions and got these numbers of hits for 11 out of the 12
possibilities within this range (so I got bored!) :

ten allen tijde          32,900
ten allen tijden          1,970
ten allen tijd                  75
ten alle tijde            48,000
ten alle tijd                  218
ten alle tijden          44,900
te allen tijden            1,630
te allen tijde          179,000
te allen tijd                   371
te alle tijde                   556
te alle tijd                      13

These figures are very interesting if not extraordinary but not necessarily
reliable: sometimes a search for one version finds another.

The Nederlandse Taalunie site taalunieversum.org answers the question "Which
is correct out of ter aller tijde, ten allen tijde, ten alle tijde, te alle
tijde, te allen tijde?" It says only the last is correct.

The website onzetaal.nl discusses the rules under the rubric "Ten allen
tijde?" and then switches immediately to "te allen tijde" which it repeats
in a longish list of fixed expressions. It mentions there are some
well-established phrases which don't follow the rules but none of the other
variants of t- a- t- are listed.

There appear to be two slightly different meanings - "always" and "at all
times". Some, eg "te allen tijd" are particularly used in a religious
context.

In ABN "ten" is "te" plus the older acc form of the masc def article, so if
it turns up in a set phrase with a masc sing noun it's probably right. But
in Zuidnederlands "den" was used for the nominative form as well, apparently
purely on the basis of euphony. If considerations of euphony applied to "te"
+ "n" in the same way we have an explanation of "ungrammatical" "ten" in
Luc's version of the phrase. Could this be right?

It's easier to say what usages are "right" than to find out whether
something is "wrong" or just rare or archaic!

John Feather
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

----------

From: Kevin Caldwell <kcaldwell31 at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.24 (17) [E]

> From: Michael Keach <mike at keach.net>
> Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.24 (11) [E]
>
> From: Ruth & Mark Dreyer
> Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.08.24 (02) [E/LS]
>
> Mark wrote:
> >One word, 'meer' refers to a body of water, as in 'Ysselmeer' (Nederland)
> &
> >'Chrissiemeer' (South Africa).
>
> Now, see?  This is really interesting to me:  Is it in any way a safe
> guess
> that the latin 'maris' crept somehow into the northern tongues and
> dissolved
> over time into "Meer"?  I'm familiar with the Spanish: del Mar, French: la
> Mer, etc.  But, I don't believe I've ever thought much about 'Meer" being
> somehow related until now.

For what it's worth, the Russian word for "sea" is "more" /MOR-yeh/,
etymologically related to the Latin root.  I don't know the etymology of the
Russian word for "lake", "ozero" /OH-zyeh-ruh/.

Kevin Caldwell

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From: Patrick or Cynthia Karl <pkarl at grasshoppernet.com>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.24 (17) [E]

>From: Michael Keach <mike at keach.net>
>Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.24 (11) [E]
>
>Mark wrote:
>
>>One word, 'meer' refers to a body of water, as in 'Ysselmeer' (Nederland)
&
>>'Chrissiemeer' (South Africa).
>
>Now, see?  This is really interesting to me:  Is it in any way a safe guess
>that the latin 'maris' crept somehow into the northern tongues and
dissolved
>over time into "Meer"?  I'm familiar with the Spanish: del Mar, French: la
>Mer, etc.  But, I don't believe I've ever thought much about 'Meer" being
>somehow related until now.  I'm always comfortable with 'See' as to a
>Germanic lake of any size (Switzerland often happily pushes the envelope by
>tagging it onto what can only be described as a swimming hole!) but where
>this 'meer' business originally came from is something very interesting.
>
Duden says:

Meer:  Das gemeingerm. Wort mhd. mer ahd. meri, got. mari-saiws  ("See",
eigentlich "See-See"), engl. mere, schwed. mar- geht mit verwandten
Wörter im Lat., Kelt., und Baltoslaw. auf westidg. mori "Sumpf,
stehendes Gewasser, Binnensee" zurück, vgl. z.B. lat. mare "Meer" ...und
russ. more "Meer".  Im germ. Sprachbereich sind verwandt die unter Moor
und Marsch behandelten Wörter...

----------

From: Troy Sagrillo <meshwesh at bigfoot.com>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.24 (17) [E]

on 25.08.2004 1.49 AM, Michael Keach <mike at keach.net> wrote:

> From: Ruth & Mark Dreyer
> Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.08.24 (02) [E/LS]
>
> Mark wrote:
>> One word, 'meer' refers to a body of water, as in 'Ysselmeer' (Nederland)
&
>> 'Chrissiemeer' (South Africa).
>
> Now, see?  This is really interesting to me:  Is it in any way a safe
guess
> that the latin 'maris' crept somehow into the northern tongues and
dissolved
> over time into "Meer"?

Not likely, though they are from a common Indo-European root. See:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE330.html

Cheers,

Troy

----------

From: Ruth & Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.24 (17) [E]

Dear Michael,

Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2004.08.24 (03) [E]

> Mark wrote:
> >One word, 'meer' refers to a body of water, as in 'Ysselmeer' (Nederland)
&
> >'Chrissiemeer' (South Africa).
>
> Now, see?  This is really interesting to me:  Is it in any way a safe
guess
> that the latin 'maris' crept somehow into the northern tongues and
dissolved
> over time into "Meer

I'm more willing to believe that 'maris' & 'meer' go back to a common
ancestor of the Latin & the Teutonic tongues, Western Indo-Germanic. It is a
fascinating subject.

Yrs,
Mark

----------

From: john feather <johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Etymology

Mike wrote:

>Is it in any way a safe guess that the latin 'maris' crept somehow into the
northern tongues and dissolved
over time into "Meer"? <

No. The root is West Indogermanic, so earlier than any known language. The
original sense seems to be something like "damp spot" because it's related
to "moor and "marsh".  As they often do, false friends may lurk. I recently
came across "mor" for the layer of decaying litter in (Swedish) pine
forests. Any connexion? Looks similar but Chambers gives only Dan "mor" as
the source. (Dan "mor" has two further homonyms, one meaning "Moor" and the
other being the reduced form of "moder".)

Note "homonyms", which seems most commonly to mean words which have the same
spelling (they are "homomorphs") but different meanings. The words are not
"homophones", which would mean (ie have the accepted semantic content) that
they sound  the same but are spelled differently.

There is another root with a very similar semantic range which I recall as
*auwja: I'm not sure whether that is Common Germanic or earlier. It gives us
- German -au = river (especially in Bavaria/Austria?)
- Eng "eyot", "ait" = island
- the Scand words for "island"
- the first element of Ger "Eiland"
- Dutch/North German place-names in -oog and -oie
- "English" place-names in -ey and -sea, where the genitive "s" gave "-sey"
and the word was remodelled. So we have in the Channel Islands "Alderney"
and "Guernsey" and on or adjacent to the mainland "Portsea" and "Battersea".
Another false friend!
Eng "island" comes from the same source but was modified by association with
"isle" from Lat "insula".

John Feather
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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