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Æðelind: "linde" or "lindi"?
Can anybody clarify which of these two name elements features in the Anglo-Saxon name Æðelind?Thank you!
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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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Both name elements are essentially the same, they only apply to different dialects (Ancient Germanic and Anglo-Saxon). BTW, I disagree with the meaning snake, it is true that a #Lindwurm# is a kind of dragon, but the snake meaning comes from the #wurm# "worm" part of the compound. The basic meaning of the element LIND is something like "flexible", the other meanings are derived from that (lime wood is a flexible type of wood used for making shields, the serpent moves flexibilly, and softness is also a kind of flexiblibility).-- elbowin
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Lind occurs separately as "snake" in OHG and the equivalent linnr in Icelandic, but its masculine not feminine and may just be a substantive use of the adjective. I agree that the core sense is "flexible, lithe", but the derived senses of "soft", "mild" and "sweet" are widespread in the Germanic languages and even the tentatively related non-Germanic words (e.g. Latin lens-, lent-).
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Thank you so much for the fascinating and very informative responses! This really clears it up.
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