Syntinen Laulu wrote in this Wordorigins thread, in response to a comment about Theodoric:
When I was young I was greatly puzzled by his moniker in German legend being Dietrich von Bern. What had he to do with Berne, I wondered? I don’t know how long it took me to find out that that was (still is, for all I know) the German name for Verona.
I responded:
No, they call it Verona just like us; that German Wikipedia article doesn’t even mention the “Bern” form except in a brief reference to Theodoric:
Aus dem Sagenkreis um Dietrich von Bern stammt auch der alte Name der Stadt: „Dietrichsbern“. Weiterhin war in alter Zeit die Bezeichnung „Welsch-Bern“ gebräuchlich (zimbrisch: Bearn)
[The old name of the city also comes from the legends surrounding Dietrich von Bern: “Dietrichsbern”. Furthermore, the name “Welsch-Bern” was used in ancient times (Cimbrian: Bearn).]
So I began to wonder about it, and googled up Dietrich von Bern und Karl der Große by Wim S. W. Rass, who says on p. 37:
Doch ist „Dittrichs-Bern“ eine Ortsbezeichnung für Verona, die es in dieser Form erst seit dem Spätmittelalter gibt […]. Mir ist sie noch nirgendwo sonst begegnet. Man beachte aber, dass hier nicht Dietrich nach dem Ort („von Bern“) benannt ist, sondern der Ort nach Dittrich benannt wurde (also gewissermaßen das „Bern des Dietrich“). Und es dürfte sich außerdem um eine germanische, vielleicht eine „deutsche“ Bezeichnung handeln, aber wohl kaum um eine lateinische / gotische / langobardische / italienische.
He goes on to discuss the issue at some length, but I have no idea how seriously to take him, and I wonder if “Bern” for Verona exists outside of the Dietrich story. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
1910’s “A History of Verona” by A. M. Allen says that although Theodoric’s capital was in Ravenna, he liked Verona more and that’s why the legend preserved the name of the city as Dietrichs-Bern. But the Veronese hated the memory of the Ostrogoth, and a XII c. bas-relief on the facade of S. Zeno shows a stag-hunt of a crowned kind with an inscription that the stag was sent by Devil to lure the hunter to Hell – the unnamed hunter being known in the legends as Theodoric
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eQNBAAAAYAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP18&dq=bern+verona&ots=vkESKwM46b&sig=mLea5wGdg270lzrzg7-1roxv-Xw#v=snippet&q=stag&f=false
Of course it doesn’t place the toponym outside of the Theodoric legend, but adds cool details to it
I have not encountered it outside the story. It is, however, of historical interest: it shows the story is older than initial [v]/[ʋ] and non-initial stress are in German.
There’s also Raben for Ravenna instead of ravens; I think that’s in the same story and nowhere else. Conveniently, it shows the same two things.
That’s supposed to be late medieval? It shows the New High German Monophthongization and the subsequent shortening of vowels in overlong syllables (as in Licht as opposed to Liechtenstein), and those are supposed to have happened later, I thought.
…and older than the previous [v], which developed from [f] in mid-late OHG times (along with [z] from [s]), a change that was completely undone sometime around the end of the Middle Ages except in southern Dutch and… Cimbrian. (And by half in spelling.)
Cimbrian turned [w] into an actually voiced [b], though, so if that’s what Verona ended up with, something yet more complicated is going on.
German Wikipedia does have an extensive article about Dietrich von Bern.
I just came across recently: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-023-09458-6 in footnote 18 when discussing the biography Rabbi Jacob Heilbronn (d. 1625), it says:
Heilbronn, Nah. alat Yaakov, no. 48, noted that he gave a short talk in the synagogue in
Verona in the presence of a number of leading rabbis in 1568 after having returned from
Prague. It has been suggested that Jacob spent additional time in the German-speaking lands;
see, for example, Yehuda Aryeh Modena, She’elot u-Teshuvot Ziknei Yehudah, ed. Shlomo
Simonsohn (Jerusalem. 1956), 32, s.v. “Alpron.” There is no source to support this. Perhaps
the claim was based on confusion regarding the place name “Bern” in Heilbronn’s valediction
in his introduction to Benveniste, Orekh Yamim, fol. 3b. “Bern” did not refer to the city in
Switzerland but was a German name for Verona.
From “Die Ablösung der langobardischen Herrschaft in Verona durch die Karolinger – eine Spurensuche”
Compare John of Gaunt, which I reckon is the only current English reference to Ghent by that name. There must be more such.
An excellent comparison — I hadn’t even known (or had long forgotten) that that’s what “Gaunt” meant!
I had no idea this existed.
On the subject of odd exonyms for European cities: where does the Hungarian Bécs “Vienna” come from?
Probably Turkish.
Somewhere long ago I came across an anecdote about Charles Darwin asking a fellow-scientist “What is this place ‘wean’ where so many interesting works come from?”
where does the Hungarian Bécs “Vienna” come from?
We have, of course, discussed it.
It seems nobody reads the Nibelungenlied anymore:
(1723,3 in Ursula Schulze’s Reclam edition, 1726,3 in the Bartsch/de Boor edition)
We have, of course, discussed it
Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Tor,
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor!
It seems nobody reads the Nibelungenlied anymore
Kids today … (Hagen is the only really likeable character. Make Burgundy Great Again!)
I’ve long mourned the disappearance of the Burgundian State. It could have been the Austria-Hungary of the West!
@ulr: I must admit that I’m one of those people; I never read the original, only retellings. Does DvB show up at Etzel’s court?
60 years ago Bob Dylan or one of his perhaps-fictitious first-person narrators lamented that “I started out on Burgundy / But soon hit the harder stuff.” Burgundian revivalism seems harmless enough in a Grand-Fenwickian kind of mode, but then you’re sliding down into the rabbithole of exciting paths-not-taken alternatives to Europe’s extremely boring and unromantic current set-up of nation states and may soon find yourself, after not all that many drinks, lustily singing Carlist marching songs in the original Basque:
“Maite degu Euskalerria,
maite bere Fuero zarrak,
asmo ontara jarriz daude
beti Karlista indarra!”
Dietrich and his men are the first to welcome Kriemhilt when she and her men enter “Etzeln land”. At the end he is one of the few survivors:
He’s Þiðrek af Bern in the Old Norse Þiðreks saga af Bern. The thorn may suggest that the author or compiler or translator knew what he was called in Latin.
@ulr: Danke!
In the so-called Hildebrandslied, the oldest surviving fragment of an (alliterating) German epic poem, he is called Theotrihhe, Detrihhe and Deotrichhe. No mention of Bern/Verona though..
Or it’s reverse-engineered from the High German /d/ – etymological nativization. The correspondence was after all regular and easily noticeable.
The Hildebrandlied, in contrast, is a mess in the form we have – a very bad and inconsistent translation from Old Bavarian into Old Saxon.
Brennu-Njáls saga features a (real) Saxon missionary to Iceland, called Þangbrand. He had a robust approach to evangelism; he was eventually outlawed because of the (three or more) men he had killed. He may have taken a too culturally-sensitive stance in his work. There is surely a lesson for us in that.
Do we have opinions on the etymology I heard from a Milanese friend about Bergamo ( = Bergheim)?
Given that the name is attested in Classical Latin (at least since Pliny) as Bergomum, and that no ancient Germanic settlement is attested for that area, a Germanic origin can easily be ruled out. That the names is of Celtic or Ligurian origin and ultimately from the same IE root *bʰerǵʰ- ‘high’ as Germanic *bergaz is, on the other hand, not unlikely.
@Roberto – asked and answered; that was quick, thanks!
Pergamon!
Tempting as the suggestion is that a city in Italy is an infamous club in obscenely flat Berlin… the geographically closest German dialects have indeed turned ei as in Heim into [a], but that happened far too late.
Oh, interesting. Phrygian or Anatolian…?
According to Beekes, neither, but the non-IE Pre-Greek substrate language spoken in Western Anatolia and Greece.There are a number of place names with the suffix -am-. No detailed discussion of the etymology, it’s just mentioned in the list of typically PG suffixes.
I guess *bʰ- > p- makes it look more Anatolian than Phrygian, but the voiced stop -g- doesn’t. I’ll say Lydian.
Burgundian revivalism seems harmless enough in a Grand-Fenwickian kind of mode
…though it is, of course, Pimlico that is famously part of Burgundy.
Cinnamon, cardamom, pergament, bergamot… i feel a poem coming on
@languagehat:
“Why do you picture John of Gaunt as a rather emaciated grandee?”
He was John of Pleasingly Plump in private life. The “gaunt” thing was PR to make him seem more badass.The fourteenth century was a brutal age.
Describe in excessive detail (a) The advantages of the Black Death. (b) The fate of the Duke of Clarence. (c) A Surfeit.
According to Beekes, neither, but the non-IE Pre-Greek substrate language spoken in Western Anatolia and Greece.
Not surprising; he says that about any Greek etymon that cannot be etymologized without doubt as inherited from PIE or loaned from a known third language.
I guess *bʰ- > p- makes it look more Anatolian than Phrygian, but the voiced stop -g- doesn’t. I’ll say Lydian.
I don’t get your reasoning here – Lydian is Anatolian, after all.
@ David M.: Phrygian is made unlikely by the apparent lack of Grassmann’s Law in that language, as all but conclusively demonstrated by bevdos ‘statue’ from *bheudh-os ‘perception’.
With a Proto-Phrygian Grassmann before the Phrygian Lautverschiebung, on the other hand, we could have *bhergh- > *bergh-, which would then regularly develop to perg-.
Hans: I don’t get your reasoning here – Lydian is Anatolian, after all.
Yes, I was abstrusively terse. I seem to remember that Lydian is atypical for Anatolian in having voiced obstruents in some contexts. I don’t know if that’s just an artefact of the Hittite writing system, or if the voicing is a secondary development.
But (opening another can of worms) how Anatolian is Lydian really? Recent archaeo-genetic evidence pointing towards Yamnaya-related migrations into Anatolia from both east and west is a reminder that the unity of Anatolian shouldn’t be taken as a given. Maybe it isn’t the oldest branch but the two oldest branches, the western branch much closer to core IE than the eastern.
@Roberto: Interesting idea. Can we test it?
There is discussion of the possibility of a Lydian etymology for Πέργαμον on p. xii of Bartomeu Obrador-Cursach, “Greek πύργος ‘tower’ as a possible Lydian borrowing”, News from the Lands of the Hittites, n° 3–4 (2019–2020), available here or here.
(For the benefit of LH readers, the entry in Beekes that is being referenced is to πύργος here.)
But (opening another can of worms) how Anatolian is Lydian really?
IIRC, Anatolian is split into a group of languages close to Luwian on one side, and Hittite on the other; I don’t remember at the moment where Palaic sits. Lydian belongs to the Luwic group, which comprises the majority of attested languages, even if the Hittite corpus is much bigger.
@Xerib: Purgos as corroborating evidence! Now we’re talking.
@Hans: Thanks, you’re right. I should have remembered that Hittite is the odd man out.
Bartomeu Obrador-Cursach, “Greek πύργος ‘tower’ as a possible Lydian borrowing”, News from the Lands of the Hittites, n° 3–4 (2019–2020)
Quoted just for the journal name.
Laudator Temporis Acti quotes a nice description of early Roman Verona from Tenney Frank’s Catullus and Horace: Two Poets in Their Environment (Henry Holt, 1928):
>a group of short stocky Etruscans from their mountain refuges above Lake Garda
Lake Garda was the site of the origins of IE conference last year whose videos I linked a couple weeks ago. Maybe the conference was the final blow struck against the Etruscan hold on the region.
…whoa. That’s way west of the Amber Road.