[gothic-l] old prussian

llama_nom penterakt at FSMAIL.NET
Mon Feb 16 16:48:11 UTC 2004


I've just been looking at the Elbing Glossary, a list of Old Prussian
words from the 14th or 15th century. Some look quite like Gothic, or
Germanic, at least:

sarwis - armour
catils - kettle
sticlo - glass
rikis - lord
alu - mead
konagis - king
waldwiko - knight

Does anyone know if these are thought to be loan words - and if so,
which way?  Or cognates.  Sticlo, aside from Gothic _stikls_, has
cognates in Slavonic.  According to Terrence Wade's "Russian
Etymological Dictionary", these do derive ultimately from Gothic,
which comes from "a Gmc. root meaning sharp" - refering to the point
of a drinking horn.  Koebler's dictionary has this idea too.

_Catils_ looks promising, with the unmutated vowel and consonants, as
if from a Gothic *katils.  But I gather _alu_ could just as easily be
a Baltic cognate, rather than a borrowing from Germanic necessarily.
Apparently the word did exist in Gothic (as *aluth), and is thought
to account for similar forms in Caucasian languages ("Etymology", ASC
Ross).

_Sarwis_ looks like Gothic _sarwa_.  More than that I can't say yet.
_Konagis_ and _rikis_ seem like Germanic (in the case of Rikis early
borrowing from Celtic into Gmc.), but what could the second element
in _waldwiko_ be?

Any thoughts?

llama nom



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