America and Americans / Europeans

[Herbert Stahlke]

I'm going to commit a flagrant violation of the
etymological fallacy here, but the Germanic tribes
settled very early in scadin-avi-a, to use the
etymologically correct form of the term, which occurs in
Pliny along with scandinavia.  The root scad-
means "danger" or "harm" and avi means island or
wetland.  I suppose one could translate the compound
loosely as "dismal swamp," which would have been
appropriate to the Jutland and Skane regions at that
time, the regions takenover by Germanic peoples.  There
were probably Finnic peoples in that area and perhaps
around the Baltic coast when the Germanic tribes got
there, given the borrowings from Germanic into Finnish.
However, through intermarriage and population shift, the
Germanic tribes soon took that area over.  The word is
Germanic, and the area has not been Finnic for probably
a couple of millennia.

Herb Stahlke
> on 2/21/02 9:13 PM, Laurence Horn at laurence.horn at YALE.EDU wrote:
>
> > At 7:29 PM -0500 2/21/02, David Bergdahl wrote:
> >> "Are Finns Europeans?"
> >>
> >> I'd say yes: the dividing line in the north is the Urals.
> >> ___________________
> > Whether or not they're Scandinavians is a bit trickier.  I'm told
> > (that is, I was told by Finns when I was in Helsinki) that
> > technically they aren't, although most non-Finns consider them to be.
> > (It's a geographical, rather than cultural or linguistic, parameter
> > that's crucial.)
> >
> > larry
> >