Was the word "kunig/kunigas/kunigur" a gothic word?

[ualarauans]

Hails Iggwimer! Hailai Iggwis sunjus!

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Ingemar Nordgren" <ingemar at ...> 
wrote:
>
> I feel that I must point out a circumstance we have not mentioned
> until now. '*Kuningaz', '*kunigg' et c. seems in most languages 
have
> been transformed to 'o' like 'konung' or 'ö'(Umlaut) 'König' or 'i'
> 'king', but also in modern Swedish (and Gutnisk) we have two 
words -
> 'konung' and 'kung'. In decided form it is 'kungen'. Konung is a 
more
> formal official title but normally everybody use 'kung'.

I really don't know, but couldn't konung in modern Swedish be a kind 
of an artificial archaism for the official usage only, while spoken 
kung is a normal regular development?


> 'Royal',
> 'Königlich' is in Swedish simply 'kunglig'.

One could think of Gothic *kuniggaleiks as an exact formal parallel 
to these forms, but it seems that Gothic adjectival formants were 
still keeping some of their original lexical semantics. Thus, 
wairaleiks precisely means "[behaving] like men [should]", 
i.e. "courageous", qinakunds "born as a woman" > "feminine"
(-kunds is the same root as discussed kuni).
So, *kuniggaleiks would probably signify "like a king", "in a manner 
of kings"; *kuniggakunds "of king's descent" and *kuniggisks 
just "king's", cf. OCSl. kune.zhisku "regal" (the same suffix -isku) 
from kune.dzi < *kuniggs.

> In older Sw. there also are
> two forms registered, namely 'kunungr' and 'konungr'.In older 
Danish
> it is kunung but now transformed to konge. Hence the original 'u' 
is
> still kept in Swedish, and we as well in Scandinavian languages 
have
> no decided particles before a word, but instead we use endings 
like in
> Gothic.It seems Scandinavian languages  are less affected by the
> soundshifts than the Continental languages, and accordingly 
possibly
> might be closer to ProtoGmc, and hence also EastGmc.The possible
> degree of Celtic influence treated by Michael I can not comment, 
but
> note the parallels of words mentioned by Michael below. Still I 
would
> suggest that the Swedish pronounciation of 'u' could be closest to
> Gothic seen in this enlightment, since Gothic/EastGmc evidently (?)
> was a result of the soundshift closest to ProtoGmc.

Do we know something about what the Old Swedish and the Old Gutnish 
pronunciation of this /u/ were?

Ualarauans






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