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Help[Facts] Re: Reingard
in reply to a message by (Is-rah-el) Israelle
The analysis of Reingard in DMNES is correct (and straightforward, there is no reason to doubt it or propose alternate etymologies).
Reinhard is a distinct name with the well-established name element hard, related to modern English "hard". The male name Reinhard was much more frequent over history than the feminine name Reingard that has an archaic sound nowadays.
Although it is said that the themes in dithematic names can combine freely, there are huge differences in the frequency of the combinations, some names are really frequent, others are rare, and lots of possible combinations are hapaxes or completely unattested.
Reinhard is a distinct name with the well-established name element hard, related to modern English "hard". The male name Reinhard was much more frequent over history than the feminine name Reingard that has an archaic sound nowadays.
Although it is said that the themes in dithematic names can combine freely, there are huge differences in the frequency of the combinations, some names are really frequent, others are rare, and lots of possible combinations are hapaxes or completely unattested.
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Replies
Gertrude is analysed as Ger-trude by all serious name researchers. -gard is almost exclusively a deutorotheme in German names and has the vowel a throughout, and it is feminine in German. Gert in German is a contraction of Gerhard and masculine, unlike Norwegian Gerd that is feminine.
This message was edited 9/13/2024, 4:11 PM
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You're right, I'm forgetting names like Hildegard, but that's 11th C., and even then this is a low German/Franconian form of the theme. If there is no -gert or -gerte, then these are more like Frankish names borrowed into German use and not high German formations. Prosaic use of the feminine word is difficult to assess outside of Gothic, as there is semantic cross contamination with masculine and feminine forms of the near homographic word for rod/goad.
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Ah, I see you are thinking of a cognate of the High German Word Gerte "crop (whip)" as a potential source of gard. At least in High German, this IS feminine.I think it is a cognate of English garden, High German Garten in the sense "protected place". The latter word is masculine in High German. I see this leaves something to argue about the names' gender.
This message was edited 9/16/2024, 12:46 AM
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No I think Gerte crop is a source of semantic contamination. In English this is yard, which is both a rod, a unit of measure (from the root of Gerte) and an enclosure. The enclosure is normally m., but Gothic has a feminine compound cognate with cynegierd (royalcourt). Yard also has a sense of area of enclosed land (f.), but since enclosed land is normally m. it is linked perhaps incorrectly to the root of Gerte as if it is area enclosed by so many rods.
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Oh, I misspelled the name Reingard as Reginhard
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Typos can happen, and hitting an h instead of a g is easy.
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