: German compounds

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 6:25 AM

>"Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be> wrote:

>>Dutch still uses the word 'want' for 'mitten'. 'Glove' is 'handschoen', a
>>similar formation as in German.

>So Dutch <handschoen> both begins and ends with a
>non-etymological segment.  [Final -n is a misanalyzed plural:
><schoe> pl. <schoen> ==> <schoen>, pl. <schoenen>].

>>BTW, the stem 'and-' is frequent in toponyms in German and Dutch speaking
>>areas, usually to indicate a place opposite something, mostly on the other
>>side of a river etc. (Antwerpen,

>I vaguely recall there being some folk etymology of Antwerpen
>involving the throwing of hands ("hand werpen") by a giant?

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

[E. Selleslagh]

Yes, this is a well known folk etymology, but it has nothing to do with 'the
opposite side'. It's a variant of David and Goliath: Brabo (David) freed the
users of the waterway from the toll levied by the giant Antigon (Goliath) by
hacking his hand off and throwing it in the river. The story seems no older
than the Renaissance days of Rubens and Van Dyck.

The amateur folklorist Canon Floris Prims (early 20th century) thought it
meant 'opposite the wharf' ('werf') as the city is on the deep outer side of
the meander.

The actual etymology is as follows: in old Dutch texts the word 'antwerp' is
used to describe a kind of defense against the water; the 'ant-' part refers
to 'against', and 'werp' to the verb 'werpen' = 'to throw', like Fr. 'jeter'
in 'jetée' >  Eng. 'jetty', so it means something like 'an earthen dam
thrown up against the water'. The '-en' ending is still somewhat obscure,
but my guess is that it is the Scandinavian suffixed definite article. As a
matter of fact, it is generally accepted that the city was founded by the
Vikings around the 9th century, as a military camp to control the access via
the river. What's left of a wooden palisade around their first settlement on
a little butte near the river Scheldt, was actually dug up. (The local
(Frankish) dialectal pronunciation 'Antwa^rpen' (stress on first syllable)
coincides pretty well with present-day Icelandic pronunciation of the
correponding word for ' to cast' (like in 'sko´nwarp' (= TV) or something
like that in Iceland, if I remember well. Specialists: please correct me).
Throughout its history, the city has never really been integrated into its
surroundings (the earstwhile Duchy of Brabant/ Holy Roman Empire), even
today.  And the opposite bank used to belong to another 'country', the
County of Flanders (semi-independent of France), with a very different class
of Dutch dialects (basically Ingvaeonic, later influenced by Frankish). It
was a city-state (and Hanzestad) and now the second biggest port in Europe,
after Rotterdam.

Ed. Selleslagh