Tiun, þjónn, theow.

I recently ran across the archaic Russian word тиун [tiun] ‘tiun’ (title of various officials in medieval Russia) and discovered from both Vasmer and Wiktionary that it was borrowed from Icelandic þjónn, itself “Ultimately from Proto-Germanic *þewaz, whence also Gothic 𐌸𐌹𐌿𐍃 (þius, “servant”) and Old English þēow.” But if you click on the þewaz link, under “Descendants” it has Proto-Norse: ᚦᛖᚹᚨᛉ (þewaʀ) > Old Norse: -þér, and the latter is “(only in name-compounds) servant, retainer.” What about þjónn? And the OED has for theow | thew ‘slave, bondman, thrall’ (entry from 1912):

Etymology: Old English ðíow, þéow, þéo, strong masculine, = Old High German deo, dio, Old Norse (Runic) þewaʀ, Gothic þius < Old Germanic *þewoᶻ; beside Old English þeow strong feminine, = Old Saxon thiu, thiwi, Old High German, Middle High German diu, Old Norse þý, Gothic þiwi < Old Germanic *þewjô. Also weak nouns þéowa (masculine), þéowe (feminine); compare Old Saxon thiwa. þéowa, -e have the weak inflection of the adjective.

Again, no þjónn. And theow | thew is not to be confused with thew ‘custom, usage; good quality or habit; (plural) physical good qualities, features, or personal endowments; bodily powers or forces of a man (Latin vires), might, strength, vigour’ (entry also from 1912), which is “Old English þéaw = Old Saxon thau usage, custom, habit, Old High German thau (dau) discipline. Not recorded outside West Germanic languages. Ulterior etymology uncertain”; this is where we get phrases like “thew and sinew.” A confusing tangle!

Comments

  1. No þjónn in those entries, because it’s a related word in the same family, not a precise cognate — the ‘ultimately’ is meant to convey that, I suppose, though that’s not the most precise etymological discussion I’ve ever seen.

  2. Yeah, that was my guess, but I want precision, dammit!

  3. Trond Engen says

    What a tangle, indeed. I think we’ve discussed the complex before. Deutschland and all that. In ON e.g. þý “slave, servant”, þýðr “nice, friendly”, þýða “interpret; mean” þýðversk(a) “German”, þjóð “nation, commun(al)ity”, þjóna “serve”, þjónn “servant, (head?) slave”. I always assumed þjófr “thief”, þýfð “theft” to be distinct,

    (Never mind the variation ý ~ . I’ve never got any clear sense of that,)

  4. Trond Engen says

    No edit box? It just struck me after posting that “thief” can be unified with the others in some abstract sense like “make your own”.

    Edit: Oh, the edit box is back! An even weirder idea. If “make your own” really is the concept, could it all be derived from þú (except PGmc, but the comment box won’t let me write that)?

  5. Trond Engen says

    Normally I would have tried to expand and debunk my own crackpot hypothesis, but I probaly won’t have that kind of time on my hand for weeks. Half-baked ideas and under-developed puns, that’s what you’ll get.

  6. I suppose there could maybe be a very, very old connection between the *þew- ‘serve’ root and the *þeudō ‘country’ word, but if so (and I’m a bit sceptical), it would have to be way before Proto-Germanic — the latter has a bunch of West IE cognates (Old Irish túath, etc.).

    Proto-Germanic gives Norse jó or jú depending on what consonants follow, and when palatal umlaut occurs.

  7. David Marjanović says

    I always assumed þjófr “thief”, þýfð “theft” to be distinct,

    and they are, except I guess maybe at the PIE “root extension” level. German: Dieb “thief”. The Norse vowels fit the stem/suffix vowels, it seems to me: PGmc *þewβ-az, *þewβ-þī.

    (“Theft” in German is Diebstahl, as if “stealing by thief”…)

  8. Trond Engen says

    @Nelson Goering: Yes. I see I didn’t say that, but I’ve also understood it to be at least two roots, but the reflexes are entangled and partly contaminated. Or so it seems to me.

    Thanks for the explanation of the vowels. I will try to remember it (this time).

  9. There’s no relationship to thane?

  10. David Marjanović says

    I don’t think so. The MHG cognate (one of those patriarchal “man ~ warrior ~ hero” words) was degen. I think there was also a þegn in Old Norse and/or Old English.

  11. Various sources have it as PIE child ~ warrior ~ hero and I was wondering whether it may have wandered in a different direction with a different suffix child ~ dependent ~ servant.

    Or are you saying the MHG d is incompatible with these other Germanic words with þ?

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    one of those patriarchal “man ~ warrior ~ hero” words

    The core Oti-Volta root for “man” (as in e.g. Kusaal dau “man”) has extensions of meaning toward “big” (fair enough) and “friend”, which makes me want to go all Sapir-Whorf-y on behalf of West Africa.

    However, I regret to say that Kusaal bʋdaalim la’ad “masculine stuff” actually means “weaponry.” Truly, all men are brothers …

  13. Kusaal dau “man”

    Cf. Old High German dau “discipline” at the end of the post. It all fits!

  14. John Cowan says

    Greek τέκνον ‘child’ (as in what Caesar called Brutus when he stabbed him) is cognate too.

  15. Is it? Teknon is considered cognate with thane, and that’s what I was asking about.

  16. @David Marjanović: The word þegn was definitely present in Old English. It’s all over the place in Beowulf, for example. After 1066, the word was Latinized as “tainus” in the Doomsday Book and then (unlike earl) disappeared essentially entirely as a formal rank in England, where the aristocracy became thoroughly Normanized.

  17. John Cowan says

    Teknon is considered cognate with thane

    That’s what I meant, yes, and it indicates the semantic variation in question: a thane/thain/thegn (and many other spellings with and without thorn) is a king’s servant. In the same semantic space we have Knecht ‘farm servant; soldier (hist.); boy, young man (obs.), cognate with English knight.

  18. ‘Proto-Germanic’

    I meant Proto-Germanic *eu, of course.

    The connection between *þegnaz and τέκνον has recently been rejected by Kroonen. His objection is that if the accent is as in Greek, the Germanic outcome should have been ˣþehnaz (assuming a shift to masculine gender), while a PIE *teknó- should have given Germanic ˣþekka- by Kluge’s law. I guess if you don’t believe in Kluge’s law (Ringe doesn’t, for instance), there’s no real problem, but if you do (I’m certainly persuaded), then this connection, unfortunately, really does have to be abandoned.

    Kroonen instead derives *þegna- from *þegjan-, which he glosses in that entry as ‘request, beg’ (though in both Norse and OE it means more ‘receive, accept’; ‘beg’ is restricted, I think, to OHG). This verb in turn is from Post IE *√tek- ‘die Hand ausstrecken, empfangen, erlangen’, which LIV finds only in Germanic and Balto-Slavic (Kroonen mentions Celtic cognates as well, but I haven’t followed them up to see how Celticists usually treat them).

  19. PlasticPaddy says

    @NG
    Matasovic has for Proto-Celtic:
    *tong-o- ‘swear’ [Vb] GOID: OIr. tongaid, -toing\ -to [Subj.],… PIE: *teh 2 g- ‘touch’ (IEW: 1055)

    I do not know if this helps. It is not easy to find verbs with initial t in PIE reflected in Old Irish, because they collide with prefix do > t.

  20. David Eddyshaw says

    Tyngu is indeed “swear” in Welsh.

    Presumably it’s the same root in tynged “fate, destiny”, though I can’t see the connection of thought myself.

    Tynged is used like the Irish geas in the Mabinogion. Arianrhod (not the ideal mother) places three of them on her son Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who seems to be a sort of euhemerised Lugh of the Long Hand.

    On reflection, that sense is probably the link: swear that someone will have a particular destiny.

  21. David Marjanović says

    Or are you saying the MHG d is incompatible with these other Germanic words with þ?

    No, I’m saying *þeg- and *þew- are incompatible.

    if you don’t believe in Kluge’s law (Ringe doesn’t, for instance)

    Ringe didn’t in 2006; Kluge only published in 2009/2011 and took care of all objections Ringe had. Has Ringe weighed in since then?

  22. @David Eddyshaw: Wouldn’t the original meaning, common to both words, be more likely to be: “something supernaturally foreordained; something which it is not meet to try to evade”?

  23. Ringe still objects to Kluge’s law in the 2nd edition of his book, published in 2017 (see pp. 136-140). This discussion is expanded massively from the offhand rejection in the 2006 edition (which mentioned no examples at all), but strangely enough he cites neither Kroonen’s The Proto-Germanic n-stems nor Scheungraber’s Die Nasalpräsentien im Germanischen, the two most important defences of Kluge’s law in recent years — even though surely their publication is the only reason he could have had for adding several pages on the subject in the revised edition. He only directly cites Kluge himself, and Lühr’s 1980 monograph. It’s a rather unsatisfactory section all around, mentioning relevant forms, but not engaging at all with discussions of those forms by, especially, Kroonen (either in his dictionary — which Ringe does cite elsewhere — or his monograph).

    The Celtic cognates Kroonen proposes for *þegjan- are Old Irish ad·teich and Breton tizaff. Matasović and Schumacher both associate the former with *√tekʷ- ‘run’ instead. Others, including both the Altlitauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch and Schumacher, cite as a cognate of tèkti Old Irish con·tethaig. Reading the notes in LIV more carefully, I see they also find denominal reflexes of *√tek- in Celtic and Greek: techtaim and κτάομαι. (One of the more irritating things about LIV is that it’s easy to get a false impression of a root’s distribution by only looking at the things they highlight: the direct verbal reflexes. I know this, but it’s still easy to get tripped up anyway.)

    At any rate, it looks like a kind of strange situation where everyone seems to agree there are Celtic reflexes of *√tek-, but not about just what these cognates are exactly.

  24. David Marjanović says

    Ah, I didn’t even know the 2nd edition had come out… even though I found Scheungraber’s work on academia.edu a few years ago.

  25. @David Marjanović: in your 11:06 comment I assume you meant Kroonen as the person who published in 2009/2011, not Kluge (Historical Linguistics specialists are often long-lived, but not to such a degree! 🙂 )

    @Nelson Goering: Assuming Kluge’s law is real, could *þegna(z) and τέκνον nevertheless be cognates, if we assume variable stress in the pre-Proto-Germanic period, yielding *þehna(z) and *þekka(z) as doublets, with Proto-Germanic *þegna(z) emerging through cross-contamination of the two forms?

    I wonder: if we assume (preservation of inherited Indo-European) stress retraction in the vocative singular at some pre-Proto-Germanic stage, then (if we also assume a */tek’no/ -type form as basic), considering the semantics of this noun (i.e. vocatives must have been much more frequent with it than with other nouns), we could account for this hypothetical stress variation quite nicely.

  26. David Marjanović says

    Oh! Oops!

    with Proto-Germanic *þegna(z) emerging through cross-contamination of the two forms?

    How would that work? How would it lead to *gn, as opposed to *kn (or the at best very rare *hh)?

    Kluge’s law indeed led to a lot of confusion (it often applied only to parts of paradigms that were then leveled in different ways, sometimes creating new phonemes like *bb *dd *gg *ff *þþ…), but I don’t think it ever led to *gn-type clusters.

  27. *gn clusters could arise morphologically, but only with the right morphological preconditions. An example would be Norse <hrogn, cognate with English (fish)roe and, according to Kroonen at least, Icelandic hrái, ‘swarm of water fleas’ (n-stem book, pp. 171-172). He sets up the following ablauting n-stem paradigm to account for these forms:

    Nsg *kréh₁kō > *hrēhô > hrái
    -> Dsg hráa
    Dsg *kr̥h₁kéni > *hurgini -> *hrugini
    -> Nsg *hrugô > OHG rogo, English roe, etc.
    -> thematicized Nsg *hrugnaⁿ > Norse hrogn, German Rogen (masculine), etc.

    The regular Gsg would have been ˣhrukkaz < *kr̥knós. Basically secondary thematicization of an n-stem is a possibility that can get gn clusters from Verner’s law in paradigms that would have also had Kluge gemination. I suppose that’s not impossible with *þegna-, but of course that kind of undermines the comparison with the Greek form (which is also thematic).

    Otherwise, *gn clusters tend to be from *gʰn with a preceding accent, as in OE wægn < *wóǵʰnos.

  28. Trond Engen says

    I have meant to come back here to clean up my own mess.

    In the distant era of last week I said:

    What a tangle, indeed. I think we’ve discussed the complex before. Deutschland and all that. In ON e.g. þý “slave, servant”, þýðr “nice, friendly”, þýða “interpret; mean” þýðversk(a) “German”, þjóð “nation, commun(al)ity”, þjóna “serve”, þjónn “servant, (head?) slave”. I always assumed þjófr “thief”, þýfð “theft” to be distinct,

    (Never mind the variation ý ~ . I’ve never got any clear sense of that,)

    and (going crazy):

    No edit box? It just struck me after posting that “thief” can be unified with the others in some abstract sense like “make your own”.

    Edit: Oh, the edit box is back! An even weirder idea. If “make your own” really is the concept, could it all be derived from þú (except PGmc, but the comment box won’t let me write that)?

    Nelson Goering replied patiently:

    I suppose there could maybe be a very, very old connection between the *þew- ‘serve’ root and the *þeudō ‘country’ word, but if so (and I’m a bit sceptical), it would have to be way before Proto-Germanic — the latter has a bunch of West IE cognates (Old Irish túath, etc.).

    Proto-Germanic gives Norse jó or jú depending on what consonants follow, and when palatal umlaut occurs.

    David M.:

    I always assumed þjófr “thief”, þýfð “theft” to be distinct,

    and they are, except I guess maybe at the PIE “root extension” level. German: Dieb “thief”. The Norse vowels fit the stem/suffix vowels, it seems to me: PGmc *þewβ-az, *þewβ-þī.

    (“Theft” in German is Diebstahl, as if “stealing by thief”…)

    Where do I start? The simplest first. Tjuvstjele v. exists in Norw. It’s archaic and emphatic.

    Next, I’ll say that I have no intention of defending “make your own” and þú.

    And then on to the main course. The tangle I’m really interested in is between the two or more inherited words giving rise to the varied senses “serve”, “seek help”, “good”, “interpret, understand” and “people”. Last week I just listed examples of words from Norrøn ordbok and didn’t take the time to look up what the literature says about the etymology.

    So, what does the literature say? In my case, the literature begins (and often ends) with Bjorvand & Lindeman. They have the following headwords (in my summary):

    ty v. “seek aid, refuge”. ON þýða “make friendly, appease” and refl. þýðask “befriend, join”. Similar meanings are known elsewhere. Goth. þiuþian means “bless”. PGmc. *þeudiján- is thought to be derived from an adj. *þéuþa- “good” known in nominalized form as Goth. þiuþ n. “goodness”. The NWG adjectives incl. ON þýðr “friendly, gentle” may be secondary from the verb. A further connection to a PIE *tew- “watch, protect” is dismissed as uncertain.

    tyde v. “explain, mean”, ON þýða. The verbs are exact homonyms in ON, so the modern difference must be due to dialect mixture and reading pronunciation (though paralleled in Da. and Sw.). Both verbs have cognates that also are homonyms elsewhere in Germanic, and so both are assumed to derive from a PGmc. *þeudiján-. The verbs are kept apart because the semantic path from “make friendly, good” to “explain, etc.” is difficult to lay out in detail. A connection to *þeudṓ- “people” OTOH is dismissed as semantically improbable.

    tysk a. “German”. The adjective is chosen as headword because it’s current in modern Norw., but the entry is more about the root noun Gmc. *þeudṓ-, reflected in ON þjóð “people”, Goth. þiuda “heathens”, OE þēod “heathens”, etc., ultimately < PIE (or maybe rather WIE) *tew(H)teh2 “people, country”.

    Looking at it now, I don’t like that the two verbs are kept separate — and separate from the “Deutsch” word — even though they all must go back to very similar or even homonymous formations in PIE. Obviously PIE did have unrelated homonyms, but in this case the semantic gap to bridge seems workable. I want to posit a PIE *tew(H)- “agree”.

    I was going to say that all this has probably nothing to do with ON þjónn and þý “slave, servant” and þjóna “serve, earn”, but looking at the wiktionary entry linked in the post, I changed my mind. My *tew(H)- “agree” is a better semantic fit for “servant” than either “run” or “swell, grow”. Since it also was used as the second element in names, and since Norw. tyende n. was current until recently in the meanings “house servant; servant staff”, I’ll suggest that it was primarily used for servants bound by (formally) voluntary contract.

    (A thrall is actually thought to be a “runner”, which pretty much leaves my semantic argument unsupported. But at least I’m pretty sure þræll wasn’t used in names.)

    Finally, I didn’t know what to do with ON þjá v., forcing me to assume that the meaning “subjugate, cow, force” is secondary, but suddenly I see a solution even for that. Wiktionary says that the assumed OE cognate þēowan “serve” was homonymous with þēowan “press, urge, threaten, subjugate, etc,” < PGmc, *þéwhan-. If that wasn’t invented for Wiktionary, I think it might work for ON as well, at least as a source of contamination.

  29. Trond Engen says

    A second late for the comment window.

    I forgot to say that the -n- derivation of þjóna v. etc. is presumably inchoative/resultative, so originally “become a servant, take service”. Hat’s requested þjónn m. would be a verbal abstract/collective *þjón (n. or f.) “service, staff” turned countable and masculine. The final -n is the assimilated masculine suffix.

  30. Trond Engen says

    (Children: If this goes unchallenged, don’t take it for truth. I have no claim to authority.)

  31. David Marjanović says

    tyde v. “explain, mean”, ON þýða. The verbs are exact homonyms in ON, so the modern difference must be due to dialect mixture and reading pronunciation (though paralleled in Da. and Sw.). Both verbs have cognates that also are homonyms elsewhere in Germanic, and so both are assumed to derive from a PGmc. *þeudiján-. The verbs are kept apart because the semantic path from “make friendly, good” to “explain, etc.” is difficult to lay out in detail. A connection to *þeudṓ- “people” OTOH is dismissed as semantically improbable.

    Why? In German, deuten means “point/gesture at”, “interpret” and “interpret to an audience”. (Not in the “translate” sense, though.) That’s not so far from “popularize” (French vulgariser), and I’ve seen that connection made before.

    Also, bedeuten “mean”, obsolete “point/gesture at”.

    While I’m at it, I didn’t notice dienen “serve”, Diener “servant” (m.), Dienst “service” – which somehow got interpreted into Tuesday outside of Swiss dialects.

  32. Trond Engen says

    David M.: Why?

    I just summarize what B&L have to say. I think even I have made the “popularize” link before. The meanings of *þeudṓ- and the “explain” meanings of *þeudiján- 2 could even look like calques of Lat. vulgus and whatever the predecessor was of vulgariser.

    The resort to “agree” (but it could also be “look, watch”, I suppose) was meant to reconcile the “make nice, ally” meanings of *þeudiján- 1 with the two others.

    Ger. dienen is the same word as ON þjóna, mod. Scand. tjene/tjäna. I was too lazy to list all the reported cognates.

  33. Trond Engen says

    Me: whatever the predecessor was of vulgariser

    Vulgata, dammit! The verb is vulgō.

    I don’t know how far into Medieval Latin we have to go for the ending -isāre to be applied to a non-Greek noun.

  34. John Cowan says

    somehow got interpreted into Tuesday

    WP says that in Latin the name of a Germanic god is attested as Thingsus: whether or not Thingsus can be identified with Ty(r) is unclear. It’s also possible that Middle Low German dingesdach / Middle Dutch dinsendach mean the day on which the thing met (but this may be folk etymology); at any rate both forms are older in writing than Dienstag, suggesting a southward spread. The direct form from Tyr is Ziestag, which the Grimms call alemannisch.

    I note that the Grimms take their kleinschreibung into English too, writing the cognate as “tuesday” (in Antiqua, of course).

  35. David Marjanović says

    Famously still [ˈt͡sɪʃd̥ɪg̊] in the Swiss dialects. (Note the English-like vowel reduction.)

  36. John Cowan says

    For “WP” read “Wikt”.

  37. Trond Engen says

    I suggest the following development (as if in Modern German):

    Tiestag “Tyr’s day”
    > *diestag “day of the servant/service”
    > *dienst-tag “day of service”
    > Dienstag
    (> Dingstag)

    The first step is a folk-etymology after the name of the god was forgotten. The second step is a replacement with what would have been a related but more modern term. The third may just be orthography. (The paranthetical last step is another folk-etymology.)

    If Thingsis is a name for , then I’m invoking Tengri. Too bad there’s no way to connect the Germanic north and the Turkic far east that early.

  38. David Marjanović says

    The name of the god is attested somewhere in OHG, though, as the expected Ziu, so it wasn’t forgotten early enough.

    However, borrowing from Low German is not immediately out of the question. In Upper German, the form survives in Alemannic as mentioned, and on the Bavarian side there is, in some regions, the form Ertag – not from Ziu and not from Mars, but from Ares, perhaps reinterpreted as Arianus by the Goths.

    Then there’s that one dioecese where the name of the day was considered too obviously heathen and replaced by Aftermontag

  39. It’s common to suggest that *þeudō ‘people’ and *þiudijan- ‘make clear’ are connected, with the latter presumably being a denominal derivative of the first. De Vries has a different idea on the exact semantics, though:

    Man soll aber nicht von der bed. ‘volk’ ausgehen und etwa ‘volkstümlich machen’ als den eigentlichen sinn ansetzen, sondern von der bed. ‘mannring, männerkreis’ (die as. thiod noch zeigt) und dann ist es urspr. ‘feierliche rede auf dem ding’ (s. J. Trier, Studium Generale I, 1947-8, 108).

    I haven’t followed up the Trier reference.

    There could, of course, also be a connection between *þeuþaⁿ ‘good’ and *þeudō ‘people’, which seem to be the two most basic forms from which the various other adjectives and verbs are derived. They of course point only to an earlier *teut-, with a common final dental. If this is to a more basic *√teu(H)-, it would have to, as noted above, involve a root extension of some kind.

    As for *þewaz/*þiwī and whatever the exact sources of þjónn and dienen are (this is a slightly complicated word-family), they could of course go back to an unextended *√tew(H)-, but the connection would have to be very, very distant (pre-PIE). Semantic change is so unconstrained that it’s definitely possible to connect all these things, but I personally don’t see a very compelling reason to. There’s also a real possibility that some or all of these words are of non-IE origin.

    The verb þjá < *þewān- is pretty clearly denominal, from *þewaz — it’s usually cited as an example of a factitive class III weak verb, originally ‘make a slave’. There can be no old connection to the ‘press’ verb, though of course ‘oppress’ and ‘treat as/make a slave’ could, as you say, have had some association synchronically later on.

  40. David Marjanović says

    Oh:

    Dingstag

    “Whatsit Day”

    Anyway, *tewt- with its two identical consonants would have to be extended anyway, unless of course it’s a loan. (Or, I might speculate, a reduplication with an unusual metathesis for no particular reason…) And seeing as I didn’t even know the “good” word, I should shut up here.

  41. John Cowan says

    “Whatsit Day”

    Surely not, given that Thingsus goes back to Roman times. I don’t think þing ‘thing,, whatsit’ was current then.

  42. Stu Clayton says

    It’s current now when you have a sense of humor. It’s a cute DM™ joke. … letzte Woche Dingstag, weiß nicht mehr so genau, wann es war.

  43. Trond Engen says

    Nelson Goering: The verb þjá < *þewān- is pretty clearly denominal, from *þewaz — it’s usually cited as an example of a factitive class III weak verb, originally ‘make a slave’.

    Thanks! I should have realized that it was a factitive. I still think the original meaning of the noun could have been something like “contract”.

  44. David Marjanović says

    Surely not

    I was indeed joking: dings is the filler word you use when you forgot the real one. (That includes proper names; and it’s not limited to nouns.) Compare machin in French.

  45. The ‘good’ word is Gothic þiuþ, as in Luke 6.45:

    þiuþeigs manna us þiuþeigamma huzda hairtins seinis usbairid þiuþ, jah ubils manna us ubilamma hairtins seinis usbairid ubil

    As for the question of root extensions, the phonotactic point is relevant only if these words actually go back to PIE, which is something I’m kind of doubtful of. It’s not that I’d prefer the more directly reconstrucible *teut- to be a genuinely PIE formation, but that I’m suspicious it has (or they have, if we’re dealing with unrelated homophones) a non-IE origin.

  46. Kroonen instead derives *þegna- from *þegjan-, which he glosses in that entry as ‘request, beg’ (though in both Norse and OE it means more ‘receive, accept’; ‘beg’ is restricted, I think, to OHG).

    See our brief discussion of Scots thig ‘beg’ (for food vel sim.)’

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