Talk:Hildebrand

-brand

Kielbasa1 has asked (via my talk page) for sources for the interpretation of brand as "sword" rather than "fire".

I haven't got ready access to an academic library so I can't easily give references from the literature, but the entries for Brand in Kluge's etymological dictionary, Lexer's MHG dictionary and Grimm all give "sword" as one of the meanings in German, and the fact that this goes back to Germanic is supported by the evidence Old English and Old Norse. (The OED, which also calls the word "Common Germanic", says "8. The blade of a sword or similar weapon, and hence (like ‘blade’) the sword itself. [So also in Icelandic and in later times in Old French and Middle High German brant: possibly from its flashing in the light.]") The fact that this particular meaning is not attested in the tiny corpus of OHG is neither here nor there, particularly if the name itself is ultimately Langobardic, for which we have almost no surviving vocabulary.

Kluge is the source of my edit comment that the lexemes for fire and sword might even be etymologically unrelated, and Kluge (23rd edition) also makes it clear that this is the element in "Hildebrand": "ob die Bedeutung 'Schwert' (zu der die häufigen Personennamen auf "-brand" gehören) einschlägig ist, ist nicht sicher". --Pfold (talk) 12:33, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm a little confused whether you mean to say that the Langobardic -brand is indubitably 'sword' or might be connected to the 'fire' meaning of *brandaz. Do you mean to say that there's no way it can have that meaning? If not, surely we should indicate that it's a possible source of the element. The central problem here isn't the age of the meaning 'sword', but where Kluge gets his certainty that the '-brand' component of names is from that meaning - an even greater problem, as you say, because we have practically no sources of Langobardic. Kielbasa1 (talk) 22:03, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

You asked for sources; Kluge is an authoritative source for the statement made in the article. For the purposes of the wording of this article, that's the end of the matter as far as I'm concerned. There is no need for me or anyone else to defend the etymology given in the foremeost etymological dictionary of German.

If you want the wording of the article changed, then it's up to you to search the secondary literature to find support which can be cited for a different view. --Pfold (talk) 22:22, 30 March 2015 (UTC)