Re: Ethandune and Andunie

Tux Wonder-Dog wrote:
Larry Swain wrote:


Tux Wonder-Dog wrote:

Larry Swain wrote:



Belba Grubb wrote:


Larry Swain wrote:


<snip>


Well, the same words were so well distributed that French, Romanian and
Spanish all use the same directional words, derived from either Old
Franconian - the Frankish language - or from Gothic dialects.

Hey Tux,
This is interesting. I knew about French and Spanish, who are believed
to have adopted the words from English in the early modern period, but
wasn't aware of the Romanian connection.....


Not from English. French was heavily influenced by Old Franconian, and the
Iberian/Hispanic languages by Visigothic, a dialect of the Gothic language. But the Ostrogoths settled in a region not far from Dacia, where the
Romanians were, and so the Romanian for "West" is "vest" and "East" is
"est" ... quite different to the Latin words. ;)

Well, I'd have to disagree. For one thing, French was not heavily influenced by Old Franconian, though one would expect it to be. There are very few French words even in Old French that come from the Germanic word stock. As far as I know, always willing to be shown incorrect, "oest" and "east" and the like do not appear in the Old French period. I don't have an exhaustive Old French lexicon handy, but my hand dictionary does not include them anyway, and I can find no trace of them in the Old French texts I have to hand. (I also can not find these words in what survives to us in Old Franconian).

Similarly, Spanish adopted few words from Gothic, the Visiogoths being but a thin layer of administration at the top of society for about 250 years, a period in which they largely also intermarried with the native population. It is an oddity of the period as well that it is the Visiogothic kingdom that churns out the best, classicized Latin--Isidore of Seville for example.

For both of these and Portugese and Italian as well, it is not the Germanic or Gothic spellings that have been adopted, but rather the English. I. E. in Gothic east=austar, in Old NOrse austan, in O Saxon osten, Old High German osten and so on....the fact that the forms in French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian all look and sound like the English form east rather than au- or o^ and the fact that so far as I can trace the words only appear in these languages in the early modern period suggests that the Romance languages borrowed the terms from English, and did not derive them from an ancient Germanic word stock.

I would think that the same would be true of Romanian, which as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) also has few words from a Germanic word stock, but borrowed nearly 25% of its vocabulary from French and Italian, the latter that it is often mutually intelligible with. Again, teh form you give suggests an English borrowing, perhaps through Italian (where the spelling is the same) rather than deriving it from Gothic austr.
.

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