User:KYPark/Vienna

A number of French riverine names such as:

Aisne, Garonne, Marne, Mayenne, Rhône, Saône, Seine, Vienne, Yonne, etc.,

end with /-ne/ that is probably or hypothetically a suffix meaning "river" so that the "Seine River" for example or the like such as:

塞納河   (Sènà hé)    lit. "Seine River"
セーヌ川  (Sēnu-gawá)  lit. "Seine River"
센 강    (Sen gang)   lit. "Seine River"

may be tautological!

This hypothesis may be supported by the fact that the suffix /-ne/ often takes the form of /-na/ (or rarely /-naj/) in other languages, esp., Slavic, which must have a special reason for transliterating in such a different way as semantically drived or derived! (this part added later --KYPark (talk) 09:19, 16 April 2012 (UTC) )

According to this hypothesis, Vienna that is Dunaj in Slovene that means the Danube in Slavic is probably another name of the river that is the Danube in English. --KYPark (talk) 09:47, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

It would be a mistake to apply a pattern in French to a German place name (Wien). Also bear in mind that the largest class of French feminine nouns ends in -e (the remnant of the Latin first declension ending -a), so -ne isn't a lot to base a pattern on, especially given the massive sound changes involved:

Aisne from Axona
Garonne from Garumna
Marne from Matrona
Mayenne from Meodena(?)
Rhône from Ῥοδανός (rhodanos)
Seine from Sequana
Danube (German Donau) from Danuvius
Saône from Souconna
Yonne from ?
Vienna from Wien from ?
(different origins have been proposed- see w:Vienna#Name)

That said, there is believed to be a pre-Indo-European word element meaning "river" involved in many of the names, judging from the articles in English and French Wikipedia- but you have to go back much further than Modern French to find it, and it's not as simple as you propose. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:17, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

It is simply a mistake to say as if I were applying the French pattern to the German name Wien I never mentioned. My riverine pattern, namely, *-nae, covers not only French but also from Iberian to Slavic in particular and Germanic from time to time, hence worth the PIE stuff indeed. Missing such a clear suffix with the ending vowel, German Wien is likely such a corruption of Vienna as many other translations suggest here.

As to the origin of Vienna, "opinions vary on the precise origin." That is, there is no NPOV enough for it. This may be where some breakthrough POV like my hypothesis should come in, however unwelcome here in general. Accordingly, it could be a riverine synonym to Danube, Dunaj in Slavic, and Duna in Old Norse and Hungarian.

Taken the riverine suffix *-nae for granted, the addition of "river" to the CJK loanwords of Seine as shown above is, so to speak, a snake's leg (蛇足) in oriental parlance. Implausible and even ridiculous is Korean 센 (Sen) whose sound was borrowed from English instead of French where that suffix sounds closer and clearer.

Other people must have gone so far enough but inconclusive that I must not but attempt to devise hopefully a penetrating hypothesis, however simple it may look. --KYPark (talk) 02:05, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Ah, but here's my point: why would the German-speaking people in Austria borrow the name of their capital city from anyone else? That would be like my proposing a theory that 서울 is derived from soul just because I pronounce them the same. The real name of Vienna is "Wien". Versions like "Vienna" are due to the changes that happen as names are borrowed into other languages. Words have histories- we can't just treat them as if they're all one homogenous pool to sort and mix and match as we please. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:37, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

The German speakers on the west side of Budapest are supposed to have made a calque Ofen from Buda (related to Bleda, Attila's elder brother who founded it) borrowed from Huns. They were preceded or succeeded by a long list of volks including Scythian, Celtic, Gothic, Hunnic, Avaric, Khazaric, and so on. You are free to believe in the Germanic origin of Vienna while it is widely believed to be Celtic and while I am free to subscribe to neither. Regardless of the unclear origin, clear to me is the riverine suffix *-nae that would hopefully clear up a lot of etymological doubts, as of Vienna and Duna in particular. --KYPark (talk) 03:29, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

(sorry but edit conflict) In what sense did Germans coin Wien? Senseless? It is Vīne in Latvian. I see it essentially riverine, akin to Wein, wine, vine, vein, vīnum#Latin, οἶνος#Ancient Greek (oĩnos), Ancient Greek wiḗn in particular, etc., and as figurative as the creeping grapevine and the vein. Here is likely added the very riverine suffix! --KYPark (talk) 04:37, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• @KY,

If Celtic, the etyl given at w:Vienna#Name suggests that the -na ending belongs to Celtic element bona meaning "bottom", not "river". Slavic Duna / Dunaj is described as coming from the river name, so you might have something there, but Vienna does not seem to be at all related to your hypothesis, unless you can find evidence for the Celtic term bona having something to do with rivers. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 04:06, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict a while ago) The Latin Vindobona rather than any assumed Celtic is said to mean vindo + bona "white + bottom," whether true or not, perhaps relating to the white or clear river bed. My parsing is vin + dobo + na "vine + like(?) + river". It could be riverine as is called Dunaj in Slovene. --KYPark (talk) 06:23, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• I'm afraid the Latin words don't mean that. The closest Latin word to vindo might be vento, the dative or ablative cases of the masculine noun ventus (“the wind”); bona is already valid Latin, but this is the feminine form of adjective bonus (“good, pleasant, right, etc.”), making any postulated Latin term vindobona an ungrammatical mess at best. Even assuming such a Latin word, the meaning would be something more like "to a good wind" rather than "white bottom". -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:37, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• So am I!. This is why I should think otherwise than the established, though I'm ignorant of historic languages. The last is often enough to guess the biginning. --KYPark (talk) 07:01, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

KY (part 2) --KYPark (talk) 05:11, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

• @KY (part 2),

Have you looked at w:Vienna#Name? Have you looked at http://www.wieninternational.at/en/node/3857 , the sourced website? This makes no mention of any connection to Wein etc.

The modern Latvian connection is no more compelling than the modern French connection. You'd have to look at the Latvian/French etymologies and track the history of the name back in the respective languages.

Studying etymology is fun and fascinating, but you need to look back at older forms, and explore how each language constructs words and modifies them over time. Trying to make connections for words with centuries of history in various languages on the basis of the modern forms is a bit like looking at Hebrew goyim (“plural for 'non-Jew', 'foreigner'”) and "discovering" that the Japanese are one of the lost tribes of Israel because of how much that looks like gaijin (gaijin, “outsider, foreigner”). (Have a look at http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm -- you might really enjoy some of the articles on that site.) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:16, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict a while ago) I noted Latvian Vīne just as a shortcut to, or a reminder of, vine! Have you seen it? Of course, I've seen w:Vienna#Name whose inconclusiveness I'm very unhappy about. In a way this is where I did with my POV. Thanks for your information on the biblical lost tribe! --KYPark (talk) 06:23, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

(posted after edit conflict)My point is that the name "Vienna" is strictly English. Any theories based on the -na in the spelling of that word have to contend with the fact that no one in Vienna has ever used that word outside of referring to English usage. The word as used anywhere near Vienna does not contain anything remotely like the -nae suffix you're proposing. The origins of the word seem to go back to words of that sort, but all traces of anything like that haven't survived to present. Besides, the reconstructed "river" word element isn't -nae, but something like *-onna, which is unrelated to the *dānu which gave rise to Danube, Donau, and Dunaj- the first is believed to be a remnant of a word from some language spoken before Indo-European speakers moved into the area, while the second is supposed to be an actual Proto-Indo-European reconstructed root. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:14, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict a while ago) Vienna is unlikely to be "strictly English" as it is also Latin and Italian at least. My *-nae is a mere reconstruction as ambigous as any others, say, PIE. It could be either /-na/ or /-ne/ or /-naj/ or the like in practice. The riverine *-onna, even if proposed similarly, may be overdone than *-nae, I fear. --KYPark (talk) 06:23, 16 April 2012 (UTC)