Re: AS gebúr; bauer; neighbour

On Mar 11, 4:35 pm, Trond Engen <trond...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Brian M. Scott skreiv:

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:51:07 -0700 (PDT),
<Craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:afe93d6f-5514-469e-a65b-f3c6d85668f7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

On Mar 11, 7:03 pm, Dušan Vukotić <dusan.vuko...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Could anyone of the sci.lang big "mentors" explain the
relation between Serbian word naseobina (settlement) and
English inhabitancy? In addition, what the words
neighbour, Ger. Bauer and Serb. seljak (peasant) have in
common?

<Seljak> is obviously a derivative of <selo> 'soil, hamlet,
village', which is cognate with OIc <salr> 'room, hall'.  So
far as I know, the root is restricted to Gmc. and
(Balto-)Slavic.

[...]

You take no interest in the answer anyway. But let it be
known that the -o- in naseobina is related to l, so the
stem word there is -sel-, which occurs in Russian as
-sel- and in Polish as -siedl-.

Two different roots, I think: the one with /d/ probably does
go with PGmc. *setlaz, German <siedeln>, etc., as you
suggest:

So, the stem is probably a very old borrowing from
Germanic into Slavic, and related to German siedeln.

Umm.. I disagree.
Baltic 'sedele' means 'a place to sit'

And Baltic is more closely related to 'germanic' than is Slavic.
And Baltic is more closely related to Slavic than is 'germanic'.

This is rather messy, apparently. Bjorvand and Lindeman mention ON/OIc
<salr> "hall" m. and <sel> n. "cottage", OE <sele> and <sæl> n., etc.,
find a common meaning "room, single building", and tell that it's not
possible to sort out if it's an original i-, a- or s-stem. They cite
Balt. <sala> f. "village" and Lat. <solum> "soil" as cognates, leading
back to IE *sel- "settlement", but prefer to take Slav. <selo> <
*sed-lo-. They recount, but reject, the objection that the semantic
connection between the Germanic and Baltic words is thin. For some
reason they don't mention any semantic problem with Lat. <solum>.

Could this be an old neuter singular/femine collective pair? Bjorvand
(1994) doesn't touch this word, but trying to follow his example, I
think that a neuter *sal(j)a- "dwelling" could yield a
non-individualizing collective feminine plural *sal(j)az.

Very nice synthesis... 'salasa' means 'a collection'; Latv. ..
Perhaps the origin of 'sala' (village).

This would
logically mean "village" in the same way as <engjar> fpl. "grassland" is
derived from  <engi> ns. "piece of land". (The feminine plural of <sel>,
<seljar>, is known from toponyms, as are many other feminine plurals of
neuters.) The dominant forms of this feminine plural are equal to the
masculine and might in turn have yielded an analogous mascculine <salr>.
This is not as far-fetched as it may sound, since it happened to several
words, e.g. <óss> "rivermouth", which has been a masculine in Ins.
Scsnd. and W. Norw. for a long time. (Bjorvand, BTW, takes Lat. <o:ra>
f. "rim, coast" as a creation from the collective feminine plural of
<o:s> "mouth".) Baltic has lost the neuter and would have replaced the
old neuter singulars with secondary feminines.

Why this concern over gender anyway?
The roots are of greater concern..

'Osa' is Latv. for 'river mouth', also.
And also looks to be related to the Latin 'ostia'.

The neuter *sal(j)a- could possibly be derived from *sel- "take".

'To collect'... as I indicated. But as a 'collection/village'.

think one would need a verbal noun *sVl- "taking" > "farmland", perhaps
surviving in Lat. <solum>, and take the a-stems as derivations meaning
something like "house on farmland". But now I'm far out.

It would be nice to have Slavic <selo> fit into all this, and I suppose
it can be done, but I don't know how.

Well.. The most likely is Baltic 'sala'.. as indicated above..

.

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