From: aeb@cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Date: 15 Dec 92 00:56:30 GMT

connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:

...
lots of stuff omitted
...
>> But since Latin has the same word ("vicis", etc.) with the same meaning,
>> and OHG has "wehsal" (change; modern German "Wechsel") with the expected
>> /h/ from the same IE root *veik-, it is most likely that your Old Teutonic
>> word is derived from Latin.

>Whoa! Who said the idea of the week was borrowed from the Romans?  As
>far as I know, they didn't have the darned things, and my Latin dictionary
>does not give 'week' as a meaning for _vicis_.  As far as I know, weeks
>are of Semitic origin, and hence Jewish and/or Christian -- this despite
>the obvious pagan names of the days in postclassical Latin.

>Anyway: *no* Romance language uses a reflex of _vicis_ for 'week' --
>small wonder, since _vicis_ is a defective noun: the citation form is,
>in fact, genitive singular, since there was no nominative singular!
>                                                            
>In another post today I went into the question of the root in detail.
>Scholars have long assumed that the velar is an extension, and this seems
>correct, so the presence of /k/ in both Latin and Germanic is no problem,
>since the latter would reflect a /g/ extension which must be posited in
>any event.  So sorry, there's no way I, or the big guns in Indo-European
>studies, would support the idea that _week_ etc. are borrowed from Latin.

Well, in an earlier post I said much the same (discussing *vei- with
extensions *veig- and *veik-), but maybe this never reached your site.
[Although I didnt think it necessary to introduce laryngeals.]

The Romans used an 8-day week ("Nundinum"), and took in imperial times
the 7-day week from the Jews (and the names of the days from the
Egyptians). As far as I can see, there is no reason to oppose the
idea that the Latin "vices" (used by priests to denote weekly shifts)
was taken into some Germanic languages, say some time in the third
or fourth century.

Ulfilas uses "wiko" in precisely this sense in Lucas 1,8:
"Warth than, miththanei gudjinoda is in wikon kunjis seinis
in andwairthja gudis, ..." (And it happened, while he priested
in his kins turn before God ...)
The Greek has "en tEi taxei tEs ephEmerias" (with E=eta),
the Latin "in ordine vicis".

It is true that *veig- also has representatives in Germanic languages,
but these have rather different meanings. (See my earlier post.)
(German "Wechsel" may be derived both from *veig- and *veik-.)

Please avoid "ad hominem" arguments; both of us think that we know
what we are talking about. It is unnecessary to point out that
"vicis"/"vices" is defective - I am very well aware of that, and it doesnt
prevent Italian or French to have "vece" or "fois", quite ordinary words.
I think it bad practice to invoke "big guns". Give arguments.

[Not that it matters, but Kluge supports the idea "borrowed from Latin".
Maybe this idea is not entirely ridiculous. As far as I can see,
the current support for the idea that the word is original Germanic
is not based on linguistic analysis, but on sources like Schrader
Reallex., or T.E. Karsten Die Germanen, where the authors suggest that
the Germans may have used the word week in pre-Roman times for a
period of 14 days. Of course this may well be true.
I am not sure whether more information is obtained by invoking laryngeals.]