Thoughts on modern methodology and ghost roots in ‘Old European’ and Baltic onomastics
ENIn Baltic onomastics (as in ‘Old-European’ onomastics) traditions are rather long-lasting. One of these traditions – which should now finally be discarded – is that etymologies of hydronyms of the older layers of Indo-European (IE) languages tend to be made by means of pre-World-War-II IE linguistics. Some of these traditional etymologies become impossible, when modern methods of IE linguistics and certain more general rules of scientific procedure (as, e.g., ‘Occam’s razor’) are applied. New results can only be achieved, when the methodology of a certain science is applied at its most advanced level. A point coming up time and again is that the continued use of old-fashioned methodology leads to the creation of ghost words or ghost roots, which are hard to get rid of. Two such spooky roots will be presented: One is the (in)famous root PIE *en-/*on- ‘to flow’ (regularly to be found in the discussions on hydronyms since Krahe’s times – but not even booked in Pokorny’s “Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch”): As there is no evidence a root PIE *h1en(H)- ‘to flow’ ever existed and as all names presumably based on that root can be explained by the roots PIE *pen- or *h2en-, applying Occam’s razor we may say that those two roots are sufficient and we need not invent a third one. The other root to be discarded is PIE ‘to bend’. It turns out to be a mere phantasma as it is not attested in the appellatival lexicon of any IE language.The Lithuanian river-names Liẽkė etc. can be derived without any problem from the root PIE ‘(to be) wet, moisten’, which is well attested in other IE languages. As will be shown, this makes it impossible, however, to connect the Lithuanian river names with the name of the river Lech (in Austria and Bavaria) any longer. Keywords: hydronym, historical phonetics, historical morphology, word formation, etymology, Baltic hydronymy, Germanic hydronymy, Celtic hydronymy, ‘Old-European’ hydronymy. [From the publication]
- Anmerkungen zu den Flussnamen lit. Liẽkė, Liekà und ihrer Sippe / Harald Bichlmeier. Acta linguistica Lithuanica. 2020, t. 83, p. 151-177.
- Anmerkungen zu einigen mit "An-" beginnenden litauischen Gewässernamen und ihren außerbaltischen Verwandten / Harald Bichlmeier. Acta linguistica Lithuanica. 2021, t. 84, p. 190-219.
- Lithuanian etymological dictionary / Wojciech Smoczyński, edited by Axel Holvoet and Steven Young with the assistance of Wayles Browne. Berlin : Peter Lang, 2018. 5 t. (2256 p.).
