Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Kevin:

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Kevin Riley <klriley AT alphalink.com.au>wrote:

> Or it could be an Italian form of an old German word for Germans,
> perhaps inherited from the Lombards?  It would then be cognate with not
> only Tysk, but also Deutsch and a whole host of other words used to
> refer to the language of Germanic people - we even have the word
> 'Teutonic' in English.  That is, of course, if you actually believe in
> cognates being useful, otherwise it is probably just a coincidence.
>
> Kevin Riley


Not necessarily.

I just looked up http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=teutonic and find
that a lot of it is speculation. Tedesco may or may not be related to Tysk.
But my argument that tysk comes from tedesco is completely off the wall. It
could be that tedesco comes from the name that one germanic tribe called
itself, and tysk from another tribe; in the same way allemand comes from the
name of the tribe that lived in Alsace, Saksa in Finnish from Saxon, and so
forth. Without more data, we can’t be certain. (It could be that the data
are there, but I don’t have it.)

It is this sort of speculation that Jim is practicing, but claiming that it
is fact, not speculation. And he has even less data. What’s worse, he
contradicts some of the data he has.

Karl W. Randolph.