Re: Proposal for the De-Inundation of the the Newsgroup (of imipak's bloopers and blunders)

imipak wrote:
On Jun 4, 10:51 am, Weland <gi...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

imipak wrote:

On Jun 3, 10:25 pm, Christopher Ingham <christophering...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

(Incidentally, I never claimed the city of York was only a thousand
years old, I claimed the NAME York was only about a thousand years
old, the prior name being Yorvik, which the Normans changed to York.
Since the Normans only landed in 1066, unless you are already living
in 2066 or later, the name York cannot even be a thousand years old.)

<snip>

Hmm, I didn't see this before, but I'd have to say we need to adjust the
statement. It is the same problem as in other threads where Cinnabon
and co. are claiming that the transliteration of Akkadian texts can't
possibly be naming Jerusalem or Hezekiah because the transliterations
differ slightly.


I'm going to argue that although it is a related problem, it is not
the same problem. I'm going to interpose my explanations in your
comments.

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree, it is really the same problem. The
name is the same, it just is transliterated differently in Latin
reporting of Celtic, in Latin, in Old English over a half millennium, in
Old Norse, and in Anglo-Norman and various dialects of Middle English.


"York" as a form of the name is about 1000 years old, t'is true. But
the name itself is over 2 millenia old. "York" is the Lincolnshire
spelling of Yerk, itself a Middle English form of Everwik (v=u in
pronunciation), descended from late Old English forms Eferwic and
Euerwic from earlier Old English Eoferwic. The -wic element is an


You need to add Yorvik, which is how the Norse wrote and pronounced
Everwik - the closest the Norse could get to "wik" was "vik". "vik"
also meant something in their language.

But as you see below, I did. The Norse simply transliterated the
existing name into Old Norse, its the same name with a Norse spelling.
-vik in Old Norse and -wic in Old English have the same Germanic root
and both denote a market/trading place of some kind. There are also
other "vik" words in Old Norse, but that takes us a bit beyond the
immediate discussion. Like in Latin, the "v" signifies a "w" sound; in
most Old English that would have been represented by two letters u, or
by the wynn, a runic symbol taken into the Old English alphabet to
signify the "w" sound.


In fact, this is a critical
point. Each time the name has changed, the =meaning= of the name has
also changed.

Not really. There was the original name and its meaning, we're not
entirely sure what it was, but the Romans and subsequent peoples simply
took the form of the name without its meaning. There is no "meaning" to
Eboracum in Latin, it isn't a Latin term, there's no new meaning there.
And interestingly, a problem of Anglo-Saxon archeology, is that
Eoferwic didn't exactly occupy the previous Roman space...in fact this
is true of almost all the "wic" sites in England...but that the A-S site
would be next to the old Roman ruins and be used as a market
town/trading center, take the Roman name and add "wic" to it to signify
the mercantile nature of the place. But if you want to claim that there
is new meaning there, it is contained in the "-wic" ending.


addition in Old English and there is some debate about what a "wic"
meant, but for our purposes we'll say its a designation of a former
Roman trading town. Euer and Eofer are Old English forms of Latin


Exactly. So Eoferwik transliterates to "the town of the Boar" (Eofer
meaning "boar"), but "Yorvik" means "Horse bay".

Neither. First, there's a big difference between "transliterate" and
"translate". Second, no, Eoforwik does not "transliterate" or
translated to "the town of the Boar". Yes, its true that Old English has
a word often spelled eorfu that means "boar" and a word "wic" that
indicates human habitation, but in order for "Eoforwik" to bear that
meaning it would have to be a compound of those elements: it isn't, it's
the transliteration of the Latin name into OE, not an OE compound. Nor
is "Eoforwic" the only spelling: In Anglo-Latin texts, they typically
use the Latin name Eboracum, and in Old English texts, Eoforwic and
other spellings appear sometimes alongside the Latin. This indicates
that the Anglo-Saxons saw their "Eoferwic" as equivalent to "Eboracum",
and did not translate the name Eboracum back into Latin to make it say
"boar town" in Latin. There isn't any evidence I know of that indicates
that the Anglo-Saxons thought of York as "boar town".

Likewise the Old Norse spelling is not a compound of two ON
elements---and here we have geography helping us out since York is
land-locked, and not on a bay at all. They again, simply transliterated
the OE/Latin name into ON, originally in runes since they didn't adopt
the alphabet until they became Christianized.

It appears to me that whatever source you're getting this from simply
assumed that because the elements were there, that meant the name
changed. But both "boar town" and "horse bay" are folk etymologies and
not what or where the name comes from.

Let me illustrate a different way: J. R. R. Tolkien named one of his
fictional places "Moria"; knowing that Tolkien was a good Catholic
caused many to see Moria as the biblical "Moriah", a notion Tolkien was
quick to quash pointing out that in his invented language mor meant dark
and -ia indicated a mine or delving; Mor appears elsewhere most notably
in Mordor, the Dark Land.

Or a real life example is that people used to think that the word
"woman" came from "womb man", a man with a womb. But, no, it doesn't no
matter how inviting that association may be.


Another real life such mistake involves the Ostrogoth king Theodric. In
older books you'll find this name rendered as "Theodoric", a Greek name
meaning "gift of God", since Theodric had been raised in the emperor's
household it was assumed that he'd have a meaningful Greek name. Funny
thing, though, none of the contemporary sources gave his name this way,
but rather in common Germanic Theodric. If we pull the elements apart
we have "king of the people", and not a title, but a name. There isn't
any evidence that anyone gave much thought to the meaning of names,
didn't go looking into the equivalent of a "baby names book", we find
other people with names like Theodric and Richard (hard ruler) or even
Constantine "steadfast" etc.

Here too, then, we have "meanings" attributed to the OE and ON forms of
the name for the site that can only be "folk" because someone had a
dictionary and looked up the word elements and said "Voila!"...but I'm
afraid that it isn't the case. Eoferwic isn't an Old English compound
nor is Jorvik a Norse compound, they are simply the name taken over into
those languages...anything else is happy accident.

It's the same place,
phonetically the name is largely unchanged, but the reading of the
name has totally changed. This is no small linguistic shift, this is a
major piece of repackaging and spin-doctoring by each successive
government to give the place a whole new identity.

Yeah, no sorry.....you attribute to them very modern motivations and
tools. What possible "spin doctoring" could there be in calling a place
"horse bay" rather than "boar town"? None I can see, and of course,
there's no evidence for it.


Eboracum influenced by Vulgar and Late Latin pronunciations, and the
Romans simply took over the Celtic name of the place, Eborakon. The
Norse when they took over the Danelaw simply transliterated the Old
English forms into Old Norse, hence Jorvik/Yorvik and Jork/York (all
four forms appear in Norse texts-though those texts are younger than the
1000 mark).


The process is believed to be slightly more complex - the names were
transliterated but then changed into the nearest-sounding word that
actually existed in that language. Thus, the names were not actually
the same.

No, I'm afraid that whoever believes this is in error. Eboracum becomes
Eoforwic by a set of typical linguistic phenomena that can be seen in
other early OE borrowings from Latin influenced by Celtic pronunciation
(depending on which Celtic dialect we're speaking of, its either Eb- or
Ef- or Ief-). Thus "ebor" became "eofer by u-umlaut and the typical
Germanic turning Latin labials into interlabial (p>f etc); became
"jorv"; "akon">acum>wic>vik.


The v in Jorvik/Yorvik is occasionally skipped, especially in
Norwegian. It's a bit like how some British will drop their h's. Yor(v)
ik becomes Yorik, Yorik has no meaning in Norman French but York does.

Yes, a normal linguistic process.

Yorwick was introduced in 866 AD (a shade over 1,000 years ago).

Oh? I've not any evidence of such a spelling that early. Certainly,
that would reflect Norse pronunciation (J=English Y, v=English w), but I
don't know of such a spelling that early.

It
would have been replaced by a Saxon rendition after King Harold bear
King Harald at Stanford Bridge, but Harold got a real eye-opener
(ewww!) a few days later at the hands of King William.

Skipping the tenth century, aren't we? Jorvik was taken over by the
English quite a bit before 1066.


According to Wikipedia: Eboracum is derived from the Proto-Brythonic
word Eborakon meaning either "place of the yew trees" (cf. yew = efrog
in Welsh, eabhrac in Irish Gaelic and eabhraig in Scottish Gaelic, by
which names the city is known in those languages) or perhaps "field of
Eboras".

Indeed, as I indicated in my previous post.

In either case, it is again neither "town of the Boars" or "Horse
bay", so there's definitely a change in the semantics, again caused
not just by a change in the spelling so as to be pronouncable, but
then a change in the wording to mean something.

It never was town of the boars or horse bay, so no change in semantics
other than the original semantics being forgotten, even before the
Anglo-Saxons got there.


It is wrong to call the names totally isolated - clearly they are
related by descent - but I contend that the parent word is not the
child word and therefore they are different.

And wrong, I'm afraid. Interesting theory though.

<snip>


So again, we can say the form is about, and maybe even claim that the
form is less than, 1000 years old; but we cannot say that the name
itself is less than 1000 years old.


It depends on what you mean by the name.

I mean the root name which began as Eboracum.

To me, if the syntax and
semantics have changed,

Which they haven't.

even if the phonemes have only changed a
little, the name has changed.

Then you agree with JTEM, Cinnabon, and Giwer who essentially make the
same claim about Akkadian vis a vis Hebrew: bit Khumri cannot be a
reference to Omri according to them for just that reason: if the
phonemes have only changed a little, the name has changed and therefore
is a different name. Not only so, but such a claim doesn't take into
account normal language change that linguists observe all over the world
and through time (diachronic and synchronic linguistic approaches).

But if there is direct lineage, it has
merely changed from one generation of name to the next. It is not an
independent name or a wholly new name, but it is a descendant name.

Its the same name. A descendant name would be "James" from Yakov.




.