[gothic-l] Re: Gothic & Greek B in Slabonic + izba

Wed Sep 1 14:08:03 UTC 2004

> I have no substantial comments on istuba >> izba. 
> I encountered the opinion deriving <izba> from Germanic 
> but never heard about any Romance sources. Moreover, 
> my mind fails to imagine the Romans living in izbas. 
> The common sense supposes a northern origin of the word. 
> I seem the general appearance of the word looks as Baltic.

Hi Vladimir,

Re: IZBA, the Romance connection is mentioned in by Terrence Wade in 
his "Russian Etymological Dictionary", and by 
Preobrazhensky, "Etimologicheskiy slobar' russkavo yaz'ika", although 
each give OHG stuba as the immediate source.  The word <izba> may 
have got mixed up with OR <istonka> 'warm room with a stove', from 
<topit'> 'to heat', possibly with contamination from Romance *ex(s)
tufare 'to heat with coals', whence the nouns in the various modern 
Romance languages meaning (stufa, estufa, etc.) 'stove, sauna, etc.'

Preobrazhensky also has Hungarian szoba, Fin. tuba, Lit. stuba, 
Pruss. stubo.

Here's what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say about the 
English cognate <stove>, and the Romance borrowing <stew>:

STOVE, n1

[OE. had stofa wk. masc., hot air bath (once, as gloss on balneum), 
and the related stuf-bæ (Leechdoms III. 92, 132) in the same sense. 
The word, however, seems not to have survived, but to have been taken 
up afresh in the 15-16th c. from MLG. or MDu. stove fem. (Du. stoof) 
= OHG. stuba fem. (MHG. stube heated room, mod.G. stube sitting-
room), ON. stofa, stufa fem. (Sw. stufva, stuga cottage, Da. stue 
room); the Scandinavian words are prob. adopted from LG. The relation 
between the WGer. *stu- and the late L. or Rom. stufa, stufare (see 
STEW n.2 and v.2, STUFE) is uncertain.] 

STEW, n2

[a. OF. estuve (mod.F. étuve), a Com. Romanic word, represented by 
Pr. estuba, Sp., Pg. estufa, It. stufa; the discrepant forms seem to 
proceed from the two vulgar Latin forms, stupha (stufa) and stupa, 
both which are recorded in med.Latin. The ulterior etymology is 
obscure: some regard the word as a verbal noun f. a vulgar L. vb. 
*extufare, f. *tufus (It. tufo) vapour, a. Gr. tuphos. Connexion of 
some kind no doubt exists between the Rom. word and the Teut. root 
*stu- in OE. stuf-bæ hot-air bath, stofa masc. bath (mod.Eng. STOVE 
n.), MDu. stove, mod.Du. stoof fem. stove, footwarmer, Du. stoven to 
stew, OHG. stuba fem. heated room, bath-room (MHG., mod.G. stube 
room), ON. stufa, stofa wk. fem. room with a fireplace (Sw. stufva, 
stuga cottage, Da. stue room).

That uncertainty of connection between the Germanic & Romance forms 
might be a borrowing either way, or even just a coincidence?  The two 
different Vulgar Latin forms could point to some foreign influence, 
Greek or Germanic, or perhaps some of the Romance forms come from a 
West Germanic source, while other came from Gothic??  Wade and 
Preobrazhensky both offer a possible explanation in terms of the OHG 
verb <stioban>, <stiuban> > Modern High German <stieben> 'to fly 
about' (as of sparks).

> I can't say anything about <*oldija> as a ship, but 
> Old Russian knew the word <lodja> as a big boat 
> (<ladja> in modern Russian with the same meaning 
> and an archaic shade, also the chess rook). 
> As far as I know, this word is assumed to be 
> original Russian. The modern Russian for a boat is 
> <lodka> where the root is <lod>, <k> is a diminutive 
> suffix, and <a> is an ending (N. fem.). However, 
> the root <lod> is not productive in Russian that 
> implicitly allows a borrowing to be surmised.

Thanks.  According to Wade the meaning 'rook' is first recorded from 
1762.  He also gives Lith. eldija 'canoe'.  Preobrazhensky has Lith. 
eldija, also aldija.  Interestingly he cites a number of Germanic 
words, as cognates, with the meaning 'trough': Norwegian dialect 
<olda>, Sw. dial. <ålla>, and OE <aldaht>, to which Bosworth & Toller 
add Bavarian <alden> 'furrow'.  I guess the idea here was originally 
of a dug-out boat made from a trunk.  The Scandinavian forms, 
including Ellidi imply an earlier *alþ-, which would become *ald- in 
WGerm.  So it seems the history of this word might be more complex.  
Maybe the meaning 'ship' was taken from Baltic or Slavonic to give 
OIc. <elliði> and the word was partly assimilated to the native 
cognate root.

It's still not really clear to me why the Germanic forms don't have 
<t> rather than <*þ/d>, from PIE [d].

And no, I'm afraid I don't know how all those words got into Finnish 
either!  Could they have come through Baltic?

Llama Nom

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, åÇÏÒÏ× ÷ÌÁÄÉÍÉÒ <vegorov at i...> wrote:
> ******<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-
com:office:office" />
> 
>  
> 
> Hi Llama nom!
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you for an interesting and useful excursus, 
> but Finnish borrowings from Common Germanic remain 
> a mystery. It is a pity. All the rest has a little 
> connection to Gothic.
> 
> No one contends against the fact that the Slavs 
> borrowed the word <korabl'> just because they 
> had not got practice in seafaring and just from Greek 
> because the Greeks had it a lot. The point is whether 
> the loan took place in a written or oral way. 
> The first one is easily explainable while the second 
> needs a serious elucidation of early contacts between 
> the Slavs and Greeks.

> 
> Vladimir
> 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: llama_nom [mailto:penterakt at f...]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 4:15 PM
> To: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [gothic-l] Re: Gothic & Greek B in Slabonic
> 
> 
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, åÇÏÒÏ× ÷ÌÁÄÉÍÉÒ <vegorov at i...> 
wrote:
> > ****<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-
> com:office:office" />
> > 
> > Finnish borrowings from the Common Germanic are 
> > an intriguing riddle that gives me no rest. 
> > Where and when the Finns had contacts with speakers 
> > of Common Germanic? Besides, is the form <hlaibaz> 
> > really attested in Germanic? (BTW, the same question 
> > in respect of the form <hlaibaR> in ON.) 
> > However that may be, Finnish actually has borrowings 
> > from Common Germanic, not Norse, that is a fact and-- 
> > a mystery!
> 
> 
> Hi Vladimir,
> 
> I'm not aware of of any Proto-Norse inscriptions containing the 
word 
> *hlaibaz/*hlaibaR itself, but there is attested, on the Tune rune-
> stone, Norway c. 400, a Proto-Norse compound word, or perhaps a 
> phrase: WITANDAHALAIBAN.  This is usually taken as a compound of 
> witanda- 'protecting' + hlaiba, dat. sg. masculine n-stem, a 
> derivative of hlaibaR 'bread'.  The sense is probably 'lord', 
> literally 'bread-protector', cf. MnE lord < OE hlaford < hlaf + 
> weard, with the same meaning.  Alternatively, HALAIBA (the first A 
is 
> a parasitic/svarabhakti vowel, quite common in these inscriptions) 
> might represent a Proto-Norse cognate of Got. gahlaiba, OHG 
> galeipo 'comrade, colleague, companion' (literally: 'mess-mate, 
> someone you eat bread together with).  For more details, see the 
> indepth discussion of the Tune inscription on the Theudiskon group 
> some months ago, and check out the Kiel Runenprojekt site, which 
> offers the interpretations of various scholars.
> 
> > 
> > If it is of interest, the pronunciation _hlep_ 
> > in Russian is not a "development" from _hleb_. 
> > In all Slavonic languages, more or less, voiced stops 
> > at the end of words are pronounced as paired unvoiced. 
> > That is, <hleb> is a written form, which was pronounced, 
> > from the very beginning, as _hlep_. To compare, 
> > the genitive is <hleba> with the same pronunciation _hleba_. 
> > I have mentioned this example only in order to show that 
> > a Slavonic ear took Gothic <hlaifs> as containing a stop 
> > (its voicing is here of no importance) rather than 
> > a fricative (Old Slavonic knew both _f_ and _v_). 
> > Perhaps this feature sheds a little light upon specificity 
> > of the Gothic _b/f_.
> > 
> 
> The early runic inscriptions don't necessarily offer much clue 
about 
> the development of <b>, since in the earliest times, the same rune 
> was used initially for a stop and medially for a fricative.  
Probably 
> when they were invented the initial sound was a fricative too.
> An early borrowing into Latin, Suevi, suggests as we'd expect a 
> fricative medially rather than a stop.  Ptolemy, writing in Greek, 
> has Sueeboi, presumably also representing a fricative, but without 
> the means of making that clear.
> 
> Some more Latin spellings of Gothic names (reconstructed on the 
> right):
> 
> Recciverga (657) < -bairga
> Sunhivadus (6th c.) < Sunjabadws
> Tilgeva (6/7th c.) < Tilagiba
> 
> Spellings such as fragibtim (L 1,27) suggest that the fluctuation 
in 
> the manuscripts of voiced and voiceless spirants was not 
necessarily 
> reflected in speech, but might just be analogical spellings.  The 
> admittedly late (9/10th c.) Vienna-Salzburg codex regularly 
> transcribes Gothic final <s> into Roman script as <z>, but this 
could 
> be voiceless following the conventions of OHG.
> 
> I've read one idea that the Slavs may have taken the 
Germanic/Gothic 
> word for bread because previously they only knew rye bread, and the 
> loan was a useful term to refer to the innovation of wheat bread, 
> which perhaps reached Germanic areas first.
> 
> 
> > Of course, it is hardly to suppose the word <korabl'> 
> > having been an early borrowing as the Slavs never were 
> > seafarers and just did not sense necessity in borrowing 
> > words to express a notion of a ship (vessel) until 
> > the word appeared in translated Greek texts.
> 
> I wonder...  Often the lack of a commodity or practice among one 
> people is taken as grounds for accepting loanwords from another 
> culture which does have that practice, whether the practise itself 
is 
> adopted too, or just the idea.  That is to say: If the Greeks had a 
> certain kind of boat the Slavs didn't, the Slavs could well have 
> taken the Greek name for it (Whether they actually did or not at an 
> early date, is another matter...).  But I'm always a bit suspicious 
> of theoretical proofs of what words could or couldn't be borrowed, 
> let alone must or must not!  They can help us to consider the 
> likelihood, but if we follow the theory too dogmatically, we end up 
> ignoring the quirkiness of history.  Sometimes words for quite 
> familiar concepts are borrowed, for cultural reasons which might 
not 
> be clear to us now.  Or in some cases there may have been a nuance 
in 
> meaning which is now obscure.  To know the full story, we might 
need 
> to consider not only the subtly shifting meanings of the words in 
> question, but how they fit into the evolving web of semanticly 
> related concepts.
> 
> Do you know anything about a Slavonic word *oldija 'ship' 
(Entwhistle 
> & Moris) which is supposed to lie behind OIc ellidi 'a kind of 
ship' 
> (Zoega).  This could be a case in point.  The Varangians/Rus 
> presumably had a wider knowledge of ships than the Slavs at the 
time 
> of contact, but maybe this word originally stood for a type of boat 
> the Norsemen didn't know.  Or the word might just have been used 
back 
> in Scandinavia for the sake of local colour, or out of sheer love 
of 
> words, or as a synonym for the sake of rhyme and alliteration (or 
> obscurity) in their poetry.  In Fridthjof's Saga, Ellidi appears as 
> the proper name of a ship.
> 
> Also, what do you think about the etymology of OB istuba, Russ. 
> izba?  I've seen two radically different ideas about this, one 
> deriving it (and presumed relatives outside of Slavonic) ultimately 
> from Romance (perhaps via German), the other from a native Germanic 
> root.
> 
> (Excuse the rant!)
> 
> Llama Nom
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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