Two Old Germanisms of East Romance (Romanian Ateia 'To Dress

Two Old Germanisms of East Romance (Romanian ateia ‘to dress up’ and brânduUå ‘crocus’) confirmed by West Romance cognates Adrian Poruciuc Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of IaUi In a series of articles, published mainly during the last decade, this author has demonstrated that Romanian contains more Old Germanic loans than previously believed (see Poruciuc 1999, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2009). The first part of the present article deals with a regional Romanian term, ateia ‘to dress up’, whose Old Germanic origin was assumed by two forerunners, Diculescu and Gamillscheg. In the final part, another Romanian term, brânduUå ‘crocus’, is presented, for the first time, as based on an Old Germanic loan (brand ‘sword’). As indicated in the title above, a special focus of this article is on West Romance cognates that confirm the Old Germanic origin of the two Romanian terms discussed below. The Romanian verb ateia in dictionary entries A dictionary of the Romanian Academy – MDA, vol. I, 2001 – presents the regional Romanian verb ateia (pronounced /ateja/) as a term of unknown origin. The author of the only complete etymological dictionary of Romanian, Ciorånescu (2001), also considers ateia to be etymologically obscure. However, Ciorånescu mentions several etymologies proposed by various forerunners. A rather curious fact is that, in regard to Romanian (Rm.) ateia Ciorånescu takes into consideration opinions that are hardly tenable (such as the one formulated by Spitzer, who tentatively referred Rm. ateia to Rm. tei ‘lime-tree’), but he does not mention Gamillscheg (1935), who demonstrated 1 that Rm. ateia represents a borrowing from Old Germanic. 1Gamillscheg’s Romania Germanica does appear in the reference list of Ciorånescu’s dictionary; nevertheless, Ciorånescu (in observing a certain Volume 39, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2011 356 Adrian Poruciuc Below I will resume Gamillscheg’s main arguments, with some additions of my own. But first I will present the semantic sphere of the Romanian term under discussion. The main meanings of Rm. ateia, as given in Ciorånescu’s dictionary, are ‘to dress up (for festive occasions), adorn, trim’.2 More semantic details are to be found in MDA, where the following meanings are given under ateia: ‘to change one’s clothes’, ‘to dress up (for a holiday)’, ‘to undress’ (only in the Romanian dialect of Banat). The same dictionary mentions the regional (Banatian) threatening formula Las-cå te ateiu eu pe tine, translatable as ‘I’ll fix you good’. MDA also gives, as separate entries, the derivatives ateiat¹ ‘changing of clothes, undressing’, ateiat² ‘festively dressed, undressed’, and ateieturi (pl.) ‘clean clothes, festive clothes’. Such derivatives are proof of the fact that, for all its dialectal status, ateia is not an isolated element, but a member of a Romanian lexical family. Gamillscheg’s view – revised and expanded In his Romania Germanica (1935: 294) Gamillscheg presents Rm. ateia in a subchapter on “East Germanic loans in Romanian” (“Ostgermanische Lehnwörter im Rumänischen”). By furthering an assumption of Diculescu’s,3 Gamillscheg refers the Romanian term (given with the meaning of ‘sich festlich kleiden’) to the Gothic verb gatêwjan ‘to arrange’ (‘anordnen’), whose cognates are Go. taujan ‘to make, act, perform’ and Go. têwa ‘order’ line of the Bucharest school of historical linguistics) rejected practically all propositions of Old Germanisms in Romanian. For instance, under bordei ‘hut’ (a Romanian term for which several important linguists propounded an Old Germanic origin), Ciorånescu simply invokes “the well-known absence of Old Germanic terms from Romanian.” 2All translations from other languages into English are my own. 3The Romanian historian Constantin Diculescu published the earliest amply documented study (in German) on the Gepids and on the important part they played in the making of the Romanians as a distinct Romance people (see Diculescu 1922 in the list of references). Although Diculescu was immediately criticized, mainly for the much too large amount of Romanian terms presented by him as Gepidic loans, a certain number of those terms can be accepted as elements of Old Germanic origin, as indicated in statements of outstanding linguists such as Gamillscheg and Giuglea (see below). The Journal of Indo-European Studies Two Old Germanisms of East Romance 357 (all of which correspond etymologically to O.Eng. tâwian ‘to process, prepare’). On the same page, Gamillscheg makes use of historical facts too, in observing that Rm. ateia was recorded only in Banat, “that is, in the most restricted Gepidic domain.”4 On the basis of such evidence, the same author assumed that a Gepidic term têwjan5 – more precisely a prefixed derivative of it, at-têwjan ‘to prepare’ (‘zurichten’) – could have been “Romanized as attewiare, from which the Romanian form subsequently derived.” Although Gamillscheg’s arguments in favor of a Gepidic origin for Rm. ateia are credible, I consider that some supplementary observations should be made at this point. First of all, I must observe that a root *taw-, with a variant *téw-, and with the meanings ‘to make, prepare, manufacture’, may be regarded as exclusively Germanic. Terms in which such a root is visible are to be found in practically all Germanic idioms,6 and those terms have no corresponding terms outside Germanic.7 In regard to attestation, I will mention that a preterite form, tawidó 4The territory of today’s Banat – now divided between Romania and Serbia – is known to have once belonged to Gepidia, that is, to the kingdom of the Gepids, which was eventually destroyed by the Langobards (supported by the Avars) in AD 567. For a recent view on that dramatic turn, see Pohl 2008: 266-267. 5Although the Gepidic term was not attested as such, Gamillscheg (as in other such cases discussed in his Romania Germanica) did not mark it by an asterisk, probably since he considered it to be safely reconstructed on the basis of a sufficient number of cognates recorded in Old Germanic idioms. In the particular case under discussion, I suppose that Gamillscheg’s main reason for the reconstruction of a Gepidic variant *téw- was the need to justify the /e/ of Rm. ateia. However, such an /e/ could actually reflect a perpetuation of an Old Germanic vowel in Romance, such an assumption being supported by the existence of the same vowel in a Catalan correspondent, ateviat ‘ornamented’ (to which I will return below). 6For the lexical elements discussed here, see the material given under *taw- in the AHD Appendix. See also the series of Germanic terms (based on *taw-) given in de Vries’s dictionary of Old Norse, under tauiu (‘I prepare’), a series that includes the already mentioned Go. taujan, as well as O.H.Germ. zouwen ‘to prepare’ and Dutch touwen ‘to tan’. It is also under O.Norse tauiu where de Vries mentions a possible Indo-European base *deu- (as source of Germanic *taw-). 7Kluge 1989 presents Go. taujan as a Germanic term “ohne sichere auswärtige Beziehungen.” Volume 39, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2011 358 Adrian Poruciuc (which represents an Old Germanic verb that corresponds to Go. taujan and to O.Eng. tawian), stands for one of the earliest Germanic words recorded in writing: tawidó occurs in the runic inscription on the famous horn of Gallehus (Schleswig). The inscription, a typical example of Old Germanic alliterative text, was dated to the period around AD 400, and it can be transcribed8 as follows: ek HlewagastiR Holtijar horna tawidó – ‘I, Hlewagast, (son) of Holte, made this horn’. Another inscription of approximately the same period (on the wooden casket found in the bog of Garbølle, Seeland – presented in Düwel 1983: 17) contains a variant of the same Old Germanic preterite, with the prefix i- (< in-): hagiradaR itawide – ‘Hagirad made (the runes)’. Some English derivations from Proto-Germanic *taw- deserve special attention. The above-mentioned O.Eng. tawian ‘to process’ was inherited by today’s English as a technical term (with a restricted semantic field), namely to taw ‘to dress (skins and hides), curry’. A less visible relative of taw is the (now obsolete) heriot, a feudal juridical term that designates “a service rendered to a lord on the death of a tenant, consisting originally of the return of military equipment of which the tenant had had the usufruct” (AHD, s.v. heriot). The contracted form of heriot no longer reveals its origin in the quite transparent Old English compound heregeatwa, made of here ‘army’ + geatwa (geatwe) ‘trappings’ (cf. Hoad 1993, s.v. heriot). The latter member of the compound under discussion reflects a Germanic derivative *gatawja- ‘gear, trappings’, which is made of the Germanic collective-associative prefix ga- (= German ge-) and the already presented Proto-Germanic root *taw-.9 Speaking of derivation, I must also mention that just as *taw- produced derivatives by ga- and by i(n)- (see above), it could certainly also produce derivatives by at- (a prefix based on the preposition at, to be found in Gothic, 8See Düwel 1983: 28. 9See the rich Old English lexical family visible in the following entries of Bosworth’s Old English dictionary (1983): geatolic ‘ready, prepared, equipped, stately’, geatwan to make ready, equip, adorn’, geatwe ‘arms, trappings, garments, ornaments’, getawa ‘instruments’ (also used in the combination mannes getawa ‘male genitals’), getawian ‘to prepare, reduce, bring to’. The Journal of Indo-European Studies Two Old Germanisms of East Romance 359 English and Scandinavian languages).10 Köbler’s Gothic dictionary (1989) contains no less than five pages of at- derivatives, mainly verbal ones, such as atbairan ‘to bring, offer, present to’ (< bairan ‘to bear’), atgaggan ‘to go to, proceed to, come up to’ (< gaggan ‘to go, come, walk’), atgiban ‘to give unto, give over to’ (< giban ‘to give’), etc. Köbler’s dictionary contains nothing like *attaujan or *attéwian, but we can assume that speakers of Gothic may have used such derivatives, even if the latter were not recorded in written documents.

Load more