Re: Oh, Boii

Douglas G. Kilday skreiv:

Trond Engen wrote:

The name Bohemia is from lat. Boiohaemum, seen as a latin rendering of a Germanic name for the country of the Boii [...] What I don't
like is the commonly suggested derivation of Boii from the Celtic
cognate of "cow". [...]

I don't like the 'Cow-Boii' derivation either. [...]

My question is: What evidence do we have that the Boii were Celtic speakers and not Germanic? Or at least Germanicised.

[... W]e don't know whether it was originally a self-name or an
other-name. If the latter, it might have been the Celtic name for a
Germanic group, or vice versa.

.... or, just for the record, a Celtic name for a neighbouring Celtic group, or a Germanic name for a neighbouring Germanic group.

Due to its shortness I am inclined to consider it an other-name, and
'Peasants' or the like (which you suggest) makes more sense to me
than 'Fighters' as an other-name.

There's even an element of "settle; build" in these Bau-words.

Perhaps they originated not as a single tribe, but as a rather
inhomogeneous collection of Celts driven out of the Rhineland by
invading Germans, and called by the same root which appears in Bauer,
Boer, etc. But this is mere speculation. It's easier to work with
longer names!

The shortness of the name was the thing that made me think, actually. Might the name *Boiohaimon (or whatever) be the original and Boii a back-formation? My next thought was to connect it with Germanic */bo:-/.

So far, so good. It's the further thinking that's difficult. I had some sketch in my head before I posted the original message but I didn't work my way through the details. I'll try to do that now, but since I really don't know enough to meddle with details, it's a fair chance that it turns out as crap.

Ignoring even that, I think that a Germanic */bo:jo-/ could be either */bo:-jo-/ "something making one settle/cultivate" or */bo:i-o-/ "of the settlements/farmlands". Or something like that, anyway. For this to become Boii, "region of farmland" must have been reinterpreted as "home of the bois". A simpler solution would be a straight derivation */bo:ios/ from */bo:-/ or */bo:i-/ but I don't really see the process leading there.

*/haimon/, denoting both the world and place to live (sort of like Slavic mir, isn't it?), seems fit for the region within the Sudetian mountains. The old Norwegian region of <Þróndheimr>* was a fertile and densely populated area, gathered around a fjord and set apart from its neighbours by endless mountains and forests. It's often suggested that this is what makes it a <heimr>. The name also provides another possible parallel. The first part, <Þróndr> -- my name -- is taken to mean "(something) thriving, fertile". Its plural <þrœnd(i)r> denoted the people of <Þróndheimr> and is probably a back-formation from the toponym.

None of this does necessarily imply that the Boii were Germanic, although to me it seems more likely to have happened within a Germanic-only context. I also found it a bit odd that the Romans spoke of Celts by a name given by the barbarians behind them. Hence my two-day-old question of the language of the Boii.

*The name later stuck to it's main town, now Trondheim.

--
Trond Engen
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