non-IE/Germanic/m

[Max W Wheeler]

On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> >But that leaves the *mora word. Is this the same as Bavarian Mure, and
> >is it the root of moraine?

> I wonder if they're not possibly loanwords from Romance, like Mauer. Is
> there a French-Provençal or Swiss French dialect word that Mora"ne, moraine
> could have been borrowed from?

I'm not the person to ask about Bavarian Mure. Ger. Mora"ne is clearly a
straight borrowing from Fr moraine, which according to Meyer-Lu"bke
(s.v. murru) is from sav. morena (i.e. Franco-Provencal). Also Oc.
mor(r)ena, which may also be borrowed rather than cognate. Before the
spread of geological knowledge, moraines were, I suspect, associated
only with visible glaciers.

Max
___________________________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler <maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320
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