The Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic

From Proto-Slavic into Germanic or from Germanic into Proto-Slavic? A review of controversial loanwords

“…In view of the fact that the word in Germanic seems to be an isolated formation 46 , whose origin is unknown and that it is possible to put a convincing case in favour of its Slavic origin, *skatta-is one of a few cases where borrowing from Slavic is plausible. This is not only Martynov's opinion but also Gołąb's 47 .…”

“…Pronk-Tiethoff uses the argument that Germanic borrowing seems to be more likely, as many names of technical developments were borrowed from Germanic into Slavic. Moreover, phonological and semantic features of the word suggest the Germanic origin 41 . Gołąb places the word on his list of Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic borrowed before the second century AD either from Proto-East-Germanic or from early Gothic, but he also suggests that the word could have been borrowed into Slavic without the Germanic intermediary from a PIE dialect, which however, does not provide etymology for the Germanic word 42 .…”

“…It can be accounted for by substitution of Germanic f by a plosive in Slavic, however. The Germanic fricative*f cannot have been taken over as such into Proto-Slavic because it was absent from its sound inventory and it was replaced by a corresponding stop 24 . There are more instances of such a process: rowing 26 .…”

“…The origin of the Germanic word is unclear, therefore Martynov postulates the possibility of borrowing from Slavic into Germanic, with *lukъ derived from PIE *leuk 'light' 43 . Pronk-Tiethoff includes *lukъ in her main corpus of certain Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic, but there are serious doubts as to whether the word is the loanword or the donor 44 . The discussion of the argumentation goes beyond the scope of the present paper, and deserves a separate study 45 . PSlav.…”

Testing methods of linguistic homeland detection using synthetic data

“…[4]. In addition to this approach, known as linguistic palaeontology, other types of evidence that can sometimes be drawn upon are old place names with known linguistic affiliations [5] or early loanwords showing different proto-languages to have been in contact [6]. These various approaches only promise to apply when a language group is already very well researched, and even then there are strong limitations since securely reconstructed and geographically diagnostic proto-words are hard to come by, and information on early loanwords and place names is most often not available.…”