Wrong etymologies for Germanic (and Proto-Germanic) words

etymologiebank says probably from a early Greek proumnon, itself from an Asian language

Wrsch. een zeer vroege Germaanse ontlening aan Grieks proũmnon ‘pruim’ (later proũnon), proũmnē ‘pruimenboom’, dat ontleend is aan een taal in Klein-Azië.

Jcwf (talk) 01:31, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

If I may chime in (I know the discussion is rather late by now), but I find it difficult to accept a direct Latin borrowing into Old English of angel post Augustine. The Gothic form is said to be a direct borrowing from Greek, granted, and probably no connection exists between it and the OE word; however, there must have been another intermedite form in Common (West) Gmc: *angila(z), which produced the umlaut. If this period is not PGmc, it is Continental Gmc (West dialects). Same with church. OE didn't borrow it directly from the Greek. It was spread via other GMc dialects before reaching the forebears of the Angl-Saxons. What would we best call this stage, if not PGmc? Leasnam (talk) 17:41, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Also, Koebler does include these words in his Proto-Germanic lexicon, albeit they are borrowed terms and probably not present in all dialects (which for us then would not make it PGmc?) I don't know... :\ Leasnam (talk) 17:44, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Terms like 'angel' and 'church' were spread with Christianity. So you'd need to study how Christianity reached England to find out where those words came from. w:Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England explains more.

Yes. But I believe the actual words pre-date the conversion/missionary events, as the Proto-Germanics must have known something about the relgious practises of the Romans and Greeks, even though they hadn't accepted them. Similar to how today, people in non-muslim nations may be familiar with what a mosque is, while not actually having converted to Islam themselves... Leasnam (talk) 20:07, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

That may be true, but I doubt they would have used the specific Christian words until they became more integrated into their society. The Angles and Saxons living on the North Sea coast would not have had any significant contact with the Romans (their southern neighbours would have). Of course, they would have heard about it, but Christianity was probably just another religion practiced by walhôz and so they didn't really feel a need to talk about those things on a regular basis (we don't see any words referring to the pre-Christian traditions of Rome, either!). And when they did, they probably used descriptive or analogous terms, just like they did for many terms when Christianity did gain a hold, like "God"! Languages don't borrow terms until a foreign word is felt to add expressive power to the language, and the Angles and Saxons presumably didn't have much need for specific words for Christian concepts as those concepts were not important enough to them to distinguish.