Talk:Erilaz

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I was always of the opinion regarding the Lindholm Amulet, that the "Alu" reffered to beer, or ale, as that entire line is seperated from the "ek erilaz saliwaga hateka" part. Primarly because "Alu" sounds very similiar to Finnish "Olu" the prefix for beer in that language (loanword from Germanic), and many Germanic cognates in Finnish typically show a very close resemblance to what is considered Proto-Germanic (look at the Finnish words for King, rope,etc.) Besides, the rest of the runes after "Alu" could very well be incoherent talk. It always made me wonder if rune-carvers had a sense of humor. Just some musings. -S Nelson

[edit] Etymology

The section entitled Etymology looks rather confused to me and conflicts with the more professional assessment given in the first paragraph of the article. First, regardless of whether one agrees with the theory put forward here, it should be pointed out that Latin and Greek transcriptions of Germanic names often omit h or add a spurious h quite unsystematically, since the phoneme /h/ had disappeared from the Latin and Greek languages. Therefore the inclusion or otherwise of h in the work of a Roman writer can have no bearing on the etymology. Apart from these Classical spellings, I'm not aware that there is any evidence within the Germanic languages for an initial /h/ in erilaz or earl and its cognates. The language-internal evidence seems far stronger than that of non-native Classical writers unfamiliar with Germanic. Nor am I aware of any such sound change as is being suggested here in which initial /h/ was freely dropped or added for the sake of clarity, nor of any parallel instances which would support the argument.

The initial h in *harjaz was never dropped (eg. Heer), most likely because there were other words that needed to be distinguished from it by the h. Dropping it would have caused it to sound like another existing word. However, with Herilaz, there were no competing words. In this situation an initial h often becomes optional.

Not in the early Germanic languages. The phoneme /h/ was perfectly stable in initial position, as far as I'm aware; and indeed there are a number of homonyms beginning with h in the Germanic languages. Furthermore, both -il- and -ul- suffixes existed, the variation being due -- according to the normal linguistic view, as pointed out in the first paragraph of this article -- to ablaut (vowel gradation, caused by differing position of the accent in Proto Indo-European) rather than umlaut (anticipatory vowel mutation) as suggested here. Does u necessarily imply a lower sound than i? Not in the IPA based on the Roman alphabet. The article ought, at least, to make it clear that the theory is not a conventional view among linguists.

-- Dependent Variable.