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From: peter@statsci.com (Peter Schumacher)
Subject: black and white [was: Latin ALBVS, Semitic LBN [was Re: albino]]
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Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 11:19:27 GMT
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sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

>Now, would the English "black" be a loan from the Old Norse, then
>it has gone all the way from white to black...

That would be lovely. I looked up "black" in the OED, and it's unfortunately
quite a mess. There is OE blaec, blac, with OHG cognates blah-, blach-,
suggesting a linear ancestry instead of a later Norse cousin-borrowing.
On the other hand, the OED draws attention to ON blakkr, pointing to
OTeut. *blakko-, or to an alternative *'blaekno-, *blak'ko-. For the
latter, they suggest that it's a participial form of possible *blaekan =
to burn, with Greek cognate phlegein. This is temptingly plausible. It
would also mean that the OTeut. words for black and white are phonetically
close.

>>And ironically, there must be a pretty old Germanic word "wiz", whence
>>"white", "weiss" (German), and probably "wit" (Dutch).

>Wouldn't the Old Germanic word rather be *hwiz given that it's "white"
>in Englisg and "hvid" in Danish? It's "vit" in Swedish.

That sounds better.

>By the way,
>how come that -z become -t in most living Germanic languages?

I don't know the physical reason driving the phonetic change, though
someone studying linguistics once pointed out to me that /s/ and /t/ are
close. Anyway, /s/ <-> /t/ is one of the Low/High markers in West
Germanic.  It is posited to have happened around 500 AD. Thus modern Low
West Germanic derivatives such as Dutch and English (and probably Frisian)
have "wit/white" and "foot" (what's the Dutch?), whereas High West
Germanic, i.e., German today, has "weiss" and "Fuss". Your examples
suggest that the same thing happened in North Germanic?

>-- 
>Erland Sommarskog, sommar@enea.se, Stockholm


Peter Schumacher
peter@statsci.com
-- 

Peter Schumacher
peter@statsci.com
