Since we were having fun with the Italic connection in the context of dogs here, another thought occurred to me.
If you ask what the word “enemy” is in Latin, you will get the following response:
- hostis
This is essentially the same word as guest – also cognate with ghost or ghost or the Germanic Gast or the Suavic gość. Guest is also cognate with the guest’s “host.” Of course a “guest” could turn “hostile” and, presumably, that is the source of the double meaning involved here. Perhaps, some guests were first guests but then became enemies of their hosts. The reconstructed PIE is *gʰóstis.
Maybe…
Be that as it may, there is another word for “enemy” in Latin:
- inimicus
This is not difficult to comprehend. After all, amīcus means “friend” so in- (“not”) plus amīcus means as much as “not friend,” or, “enemy.”
Now this is where things get interesting. There are certain languages that drop the initial vowel resulting in:
- nemico, nimico (Italian)
- nemigo (Venetic)
- nimicu, nnimicu, nemicu (Sicilian)
- nemmico (Neapolitan)
- nemaic (Dalmatian)
Compare this too with the Old Occitan nimistà (enmity).
Now if you ask, for example, what is the plural of the Italian nemico you will find out that you have to go with:
- nemici
The reconstructed Suavic word for Germans is, of course:
- *němьcь
In the various Suavic languages you have:
- Niemiec (Polish)
- Němec (Czech)
- Nemec (Slovak)
- Nemec (Slovene)
- Nijemac (Croatian)
- Немац (Serb)
- немец (Russian)
- німець (Ukrainian)
Coincidence?
Or it this further proof of a Venetic connection or Venetic vocabulary inside the Suavic?
This may be further proof that the proposed etymologies of Suavs as people “of the word” and Germans as “the mute ones” are nothing more than “folk etymologies.” That Suavs just means “one’s own people” rather than having anything to do with “words” and that the word for “word” is derived from the word for “one’s own people” see here.
Thus you could say:
- “people of the word” vs “the mute ones”
or, much more likely, you could pair up:
- “one’s own people” with “the enemies.”
This may be unpleasant/uncomfortable but seems more likely than the “word” or “speech” etymology.
More interestingly, we have:
- Suevi and Nemetes
Even more interestingly, in Gothic we have:
- slavan
which means “to be quiet” (compare this with the modern German schweigen) and may well be derived from the Suavic self-name of one’s own people. In this fashion, the German would have been the intermediary for the Suav name to the Byzantines who then lent it to the post-Roman “Latin” that is Western Frankish/Gothic and then Carolingian word.
This fact was already noticed in the 19th century by the Polish priest Jan Guszkiewicz in “A Word About the Forefathers” or Słowo o Praojcach (Ein Wort über die Urväter).
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