Reconstruction talk:Old English/nihtmare

RFV discussion: December 2019–January 2021
--Lvovmauro (talk) 04:25, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * What does it mean to RFV a reconstructed term? By the definition of "reconstruction", there must not be any direct attestations.--Urszag (talk) 06:35, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Its existence must be establishable through other means, still. In this case, if there is one descendant and one ancestor, it can be inferred that the intermediate form must have existed. The ancestor has descendants in all West Germanic languages, which are unlikely to all be parallel formations. Therefore, I think the existence of the Old English term can be verified. —Rua (mew) 11:03, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I would question the "ancestor" too. The more likely explanation is that all of these are late coinages, or calques/adaptations from neighboring languages. --Lvovmauro (talk) 11:17, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * The late coinages explanation seems unlikely. Some sort of link between the terms must be supposed; they seem too specific (the night- part is obvious, but the -mare part seems like a highly specific choice and unlikely to be arrived at independently by all languages involved) to be independent coinages all around the same time in the High Middle Ages. So the next option is that it's some sort of Wanderwort/was calqued all over the place. Wanderwörter however tend to fall in way different semantic fields (especially trade and technology), not a term like nightmare. Supposing inheritance from a common ancestor seems like me to be the most elegant solution, certainly less of a stretch than a calque or independent coinages around the same time. The lack of attestations before the High Middle Ages is explained easily by the genres of literature attested for the "Old" Germanic languages, which are unlikely to attest a term like "nightmare", and by the relatively small size of those corpora which further reduces the likelihood of attestation. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 11:34, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * No. The history is just so that virtually nobody knew English on the continent until the middle of the 18th century. Every book that came from Britain was in Latin, one could not obtain anything in English if one sought it, and few people went over the sea, just names for some trading items like weaponry (→ ) and fabrics could pass. There was no exposure that could let a word like this be calqued. Fay Freak (talk) 13:34, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Who said anything about calquing from English? It's not like the English were locked in a cellar for hundreds of years. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:42, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * He said, “calques from neighboring languages”, i.e. the neighbours of English would have calqued, also since he says “these” it would not be only English but the self-same continental languages. Fay Freak (talk) 14:45, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Since he says he is "question[ing] the 'ancestor'" of the Old English term, I took his comment to mean he thinks the various (non-Old English) Germanic languages in which this term is attested calqued it from one (non-Old English) Germanic language which formed the compound in its own day rather than inheriting it from an ancestor (Proto-West Germanic). - -sche (discuss) 02:20, 6 January 2020 (UTC)


 * I tried to find any outside reference that reconstructs this, and noticed that they all seem to instead say that Middle English ni(g)htmare is a compound where merely the latter element derives from OE. I'm also not sure I see the utility of having a page like this; what does it give that could not be given in the PWG and Middle English entries? The reconstructed OE pronunciation and declension? Meh. (I'm not saying it should be deleted, though.) - -sche (discuss) 02:20, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
 * RFV passed, rfvs for reconstructed terms are always difficult to resolve due to reconstructed terms, as has been pointed out above, by definition are not attested (really should be RFDs instead, I guess?). But I think there is no strong consensus to either delete or keep here, so I don't think it's controversial to let the entry stay for now. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 11:00, 11 January 2021 (UTC)