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Nikolaev the germanic word for sword

The Germanic word for ? sword ? and delocatival derivation in Proto-Indo- European ? Alexander Nikolaev Harvard University There is no compelling etymology for the Germanic word for sword OHG swert OE sweord This paper argues that this word is related to Cuneiform Luvian si ual ? dagger ? both words are derived from a stem seh u- ? sharp ? Gmc suerda-n goes back to a substantivized adjective sh u-er-tó- ? sharp ? with a loss of the laryngeal already in the protolanguage derived from a locative sh u-er compare gheim-en-to- ? wintry ? from gheim-en ? in winter ? The problem The re exes of Gmc suerda-n ? sword ? are found in West and North Germanic OHG swert OS swerd OE sweord ON sverd in Gothic this word was replaced by hairus This word has no established etymology and the sad dictum of etymological dictionaries is usually ??Herkunft unklar ? cf Holthausen Vennemann Kluge-Seebold Previous scholarship Previous attempts to explain this form have been few and unsatisfactory In this section I will critically examine the more serious ones The handbooks usually contain a reference to Falk- Torp where a relationship between Gmc ? In this paper I am using a special notational system ? stands for ??internally derived from ? ?? stands for ??externally derived from ? denotes phonological development and stands for all kinds of nicht lautgesetzlich development such as the leveling of ablaut grades within a paradigm I am grateful to Jay Jasano ? Craig Melchert Sergio Neri Alan Nussbaum Martin Peters and Jeremy Rau for many helpful comments I am also grateful to Anatoly Liberman who kindly sent me a printout from his forthcoming bibliography of English etymology with entries for the word sword Finally I would like to thank two anonymous referees for careful comments on earlier version of this paper The responsibility for all errors of fact and judgment is of course entirely mine The Journal of Indo-European Studies CThe Germanic word for ? sword ? and delocatival derivation in PIE suerda- and Gk ??Achaean ? êor ? sword ? was assumed with a further connection with the verbal root of Gk ée rv ? to lift ? and Lith sveTti ? to weigh ? This idea has had an unfortunate Nachleben and persists in the literature recently cf Huld To begin with there is a semantic problem since this etymology presupposes a reference to a weapon hanging at one ? s hip a basic meaning ? Wehrgeh? nge ? is not easy to parallel for a word of this meaning in other words hanging is simply not a pivotal function of a sword The formal side of this etymology too rests on rather shaky ground Myc a-o-ri-me-ne shows that there never was an internal digamma in êor and so a proto-form sh uor- is out of the question Lastly there is an alternative etymology for êor it appears very plausible to trace this word back to h ? s or h