Talk:dungeon

Proto-Indo-European Etimology

One accepted etymology is simply: Old French “donjon” from Latin “dominium”: http://www.castit.it/pagine/04supporti/glossario/glosdef.html under "dongione".

This Germanic derivation at any price upon an hypothetical chain of hypothetical reconstructions since Proto-Indo-European sounds not very trustworthy to me.

 --46.115.16.90 17:02, 4 July 2012 (UTC) Marco Pagliero Berlin

That would be dominio, as mentioned under donjon#French. Anyway, considering that *dungijǭ is attested in Old English and Old Norse, it's not a purely hypothetical reconstruction. Semantically, the Germanic etymology is actually more straightforward. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:44, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Etymology

@Urszag, I think the Middle English dǒnǧǒun [[1]] has sufficient extraneous senses (in MED, sense 3) not found in Anglo-Norman, and which do not appear to come from Middle English donge (like "whirlpool", "moat", "cave" etc.), which apparently must come from Old English (cf. Middle English dingle). This makes it not a pure borrowing, but a conflation of similar sounding words into one. Leasnam (talk) 21:28, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I think I acted too hastily in removing all mention of 'donge'. I came to this page from Reconstruction:Latin/dominionem; a Germanic origin has been proposed for that too, but seems unlikely all things considered, and so I was initially suspicious when seeing it mentioned it on this page (and when I couldn't at first see any other dictionaries that gave as much emphasis as we did to that root). However, based on the example of interchangeable use in Bishop 2019, it does now seem likely to me that there was some connection.--Urszag (talk) 21:33, 20 April 2024 (UTC)