Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/apô

To what would the users of this referring when this word would have been in use? Were there apes in Central/Eastern Europe? Were there traveling circuses? DCDuring TALK 17:04, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know. It is attested in several "old" languages, and all the descendants match up (all are a masculine an-stem). So it can't postdate Proto-Germanic by more than a few centuries. There were no apes in Germanic territory so it must be a loanword, but there are no further explanations for this word as it has no certain cognates anywhere. It's curious that it wasn't borrowed from Latin simia, and since the Romans were likely the only people that might have introduced the Germanic people to apes in the late Germanic period, it seems to me that the borrowing was possibly/probably older. But it is still very much a mystery. —CodeCat 17:15, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Just, out of curiosity, couldn't it just be that an existing Germanic word was reused for this animal, once it was encountered, based on a certain physical aspect, sound or behaviour that it makes or possesses? Following, the word could gradually have lost its initial meaning or could have fallen out of use? Like swan that was related to the lost Old English word swinsian "to sing". Morgengave (talk) 22:24, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

It's possible but not as likely. /p/ was a rare sound in Germanic, mainly because it came from PIE /b/ which was likewise rare. So there is a good chance that this is a loanword just because of the /p/ alone. —CodeCat 22:29, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

See now ape#Etymology. Schrijver once talked about this problem; as far as I remember, some individual apes or monkeys were imported into ancient Northern Europe, as Roman-era remains have been found on Britannia at least. But my memory is hazy. Anyway, the possibility that an ancient Germanic word for "water sprite" (originally "being that belongs to the water"), precisely cognate with the Celtic word for "river", was repurposed to name the new animal makes a lot of sense to me. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:40, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

You may be right, I don't know. At any rate the word seems to have meant "ape" at a very early stage already. Pfeifer ([[1]]) says that "durch reisende Kaufleute wird es [das Tier = der Affe] den Germanen bekannt" ("via travelling merchants it [the ape] becomes familiar to the Germanics"). I'm not in a position to give judgment on this, but it would make a lot of sense to me. Travelling merchants need attention and an ape would without doubt have been an item that gave you attention. Kolmiel (talk) 20:30, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

It is admittedly true (and a good point) that no other meaning of the word is attested, but note that the word is not attested in East Germanic, apparently, which makes it possible to reconstruct it with this meaning to Proto-Northwest-Germanic at most, not to Proto-Germanic. It's very well possible that the putative semantic shift happened relatively late. This is all speculative and I won't pretend otherwise. I just think it is an interesting and plausible alternative possibility to the traditional assumption of a loanword.

The loanword hypothesis is, of course, supported by Hesychius' abránas (perhaps a corruption of an original *abbánas), a word said to be a Celtic term for some kind of monkeys, and words for monkeys and the like from various Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages with an initial consonant (usually a velar or uvular stop), such as Sanskrit kapí- and others listed in Witzel (2001), Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts, available on the web (this is all pointed out in Kroonen's Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic). This remains eminently possible, of course. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:04, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Note that the Hesychian gloss could actually support Schrijver's hypothesis. He probably adduced it as evidence. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:16, 5 March 2015 (UTC)