(06-01-2020, 01:18 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP, if we're not looking at a member of the north-Germanic language family, then final -en as definite article is unlikely. You may be on to something though. 

In modern Dutch, "polsen" means wrists. Might the VM word be related?

Totally agree. It's not German. These forms are limited to places like Saxony, to the east of Saxony, parts of coastal Normandy. It's Germanic and was blended with German in some places. If it's not north-Germanic then the "-en" would not be interpreted as an article.


Polsen is familiar to me as the place one takes a pulse and in Spanish, Norwegian, and numerous languages comes from Latin (I think).

You might be onto something. palsen. Pulse (wrist). I never thought of that.

Basically Stefan translated it like you do (with the word "pain" being omitted for brevity), but "nim" is imperative, it's not 3rd person singular, is it?

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Re wrists.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the great resource for all things Germanic which I ever consult in the first place. I haven't seen palsen as wrists there.

I've checked the etymology, it looks like modern Dutch derived the word for wrist from the word for pulse. This avenue can be closed. 

Hmm I'm also puzzled by your sentence Anton, I must look at it again tomorrow.

(06-01-2020, 01:21 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

So I stlll can't make the puzzle of the grammar.

When I read medieval Yiddish I'm constantly having to bend my brain around the grammar because... well, it was sometimes rather creative. As an example, the word "mir" was sometimes substituted in the same sentence for both "ich" and "mich". You find yourself scratching your head over who did what to whom.

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I wouldn't throw out the possibility of "pulse" (at least not yet). The substitution of "a" would not be especially unusual and pulse is one of those words that is similar in many languages.

...But if we consider the p/b interchangeability which is liked in Switzerland the more so (they changed "p" to "b" even in Roman roots, such as "brobieren" instead of "probieren", as the Idiotikon reveals), then we may stumble upon something...

Balse:

"Schenkung, Ehrengabe" in FNHD  and "zu lesen" in MHD

Bals:

Balsam

How do you like it?

Balsam would not be put in plural, so maybe a declensed form of singular?

"Zu lesen" is also something not entirely out of scope of a book.

The a for e substitution and the p for b substitution was also pretty common in southern Bavaria and Tirol.

Well, it's not exactly "zu lesen", what Lexer says is: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(Referring to a certain source)

"ist halse zu lesen"

To read the neck? What's that?

But it says balse is "f.", means it's a feminine noun.

Means it, you should read "halse" when you see "balse"? Quite enlightening. I will.

It can also mean "throat" (imagine pointing to your neck).

To read from the throat. To read out loud.

As a total off-topic aside, I can't make any sense of Basque or Gaelic (except for the newer loanwords that they have adopted from other languages). I can work out Arabic more easily than Basque or Gaelic and I don't know Arabic at all (Lithuanian and Latvian are a struggle also).

This is "throat" in Welsh:  gwddf.   I've always wanted to learn one of the Gaelic languages because I like the sound of it, but it would take such a long time to learn a completely unrelatable vocabulary.

Luxembourgish is not so bad. It's like German with shortened words.

In Yiddish, throat is the same as in Scandinavian except with that extra touch of the tongue that creates the "d" (האַלדז) haldz. If you know German, Yiddish isn't too difficult to read. Actually, when I first saw the text on 116v I thought maybe Yiddish, but the patterns aren't quite right.

No I think that's a dead-end, cause "f." means it's a noun, must really be pointing to some misprint or scribal error... that would not be cast back from "b" to "p".

As for "bals" as balsam, I think it's worth exploring further, the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. says "balsame" is auch "bals", referring to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. book of Schwabischen (that's exactly the same Southwestern Germany...) Minnesinger poetry, but the exact references are unclear, and the text search does not seem to work... should I educate myself with Swabian poetry?