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

[Ingemar Nordgren]

Hails Ualarauans!

You wrote:
> 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?

Quite so, it is correct! We must also remember Swedish was heavily
influenced by German in the Middle Ages and since then writings like
Konung, Kongelig et c. are found in old official documents.Only konung
survives now, however, in contemporary documents Many of our officials
and even kings were German-speaking and in the 18th c. also
French-speaking. Hence the official language has been distorted to max
in old documents.

> > '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.

Kunglig means indeed all these things 'like a king', belonging to a
king', 'born of  royal blood',and it depends on the context what it
means specificially. Literally it says 'like a king' and the ending
'-lig' is medieval and probably influenced from danish like also
'rige' in Sverige et c. The normal Sw.  word for 'like' is 'lik' and
for 'rige'(realm) it is 'rike'. The literal meaning of 'kunglig' hence
suits with '*kuniggaleiks'. A more poetic writing, but still quite
correct, should say 'kungalik'or 'konungalik' which rhymes good with
'*kuniggaleiks' but in this  case the problem is you could mistake
'kungalik' for 'the dead corpse of a king' since 'lik' as well kan
mean 'corpse'.


> > 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?

I do not in any case, but I presume it should have been quite close
since both Swedish and Gutnisk and Norwegian have preserved a relative
 similar  pronounciation of it, in spite of different developement in
Denmark with continental influx I presume.

Best 
Ingemar







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