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[Facts] Re: Æðelind: "linde" or "lindi"?
Neither and both. Despite the entry here Æðelind is not an OE name. It represents Gallo-Frankish Adallindis, a concubine of Charlemagne. The lindis here is Germ. *linðjo, lithe, mild, sweet, with assimilation of the nasal to the preceding vowel in English, Frisian, Saxon and Norse (in the latter written linnr but pronounced liðr), while in Frankish, German and Latin pronunciation the dental fricative becomes a voiced stop, d, and in the south is unvoiced to t. As a feminine adjective used as a deuterotheme it is declined irregularly. The standard English fem. nominative should be lið, the accusative liðe, among the broad range of dialects loosely classed as German linde is common, succeeding earlier lindi, while some old Norse inscriptions also have lindi (apparently with d representing ð, but possibly the Danish pronunciation). In addition to the feminine deuterotheme we must accept a prototheme from a different source, *lindo, the linden or lime tree, as a euphemism for "shield", appearing as Lind- (Lindwin, Lindoald, Lindwulf and the continental Lintbalt (with d unvoiced to t) and Linzo (t to z). While fem. it does not occur as a deuterotheme in English and can't reliably be identified as such on the continent where the expected -lint form is not found.Lindi and Linde are not two different name elements, but the same. Terminal e is just the regular development of terminal i in several Germanic languages. German lind "serpent" is precluded by occam's razor — it's masculine, not feminine; extremely rare except in the compound lindwurm; and can't reliably be linked to English lið/liðe (which lacks a sense of "serpent" in prosaic use).
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