[gothic-l] Gothic influence on Baltic Prussians

[jdm314 at AOL.COM]

<< I looked at one instance of Gothic taking up foreign words the other
day. This was Wulfila's use of the word "gaiainna" in his Bible
translation. Here he simply took the Greek *) word gamma-epsilon-
epsilon-nu-nu-alpha and created a new Gotic word that corresponded to it. >>

Yup, Gothic virtually always borrow it's Hebrew words directly from Greek, occasionally with some Latin influience (usually limited to reinserting medial "h"es)... absolutely no reference to the original Hebrew form.


<< [funny why he chose the diphtong(?) "ai" for a Greek epsilon btw -
maybe this tells us something about Gothic phonetics - anyone any
comments?] >>

ai is not a diphthong here. Whether or not it is ever a diphthong is a matter of dispute. The same goes for au. See http://www.terracom.net/~dorothea/david/gothic/intro.html for an intro to Gothic phonetics.
    The really interesting thing is what Gothic orthography tells us about contemporary GREEK phonetics (since Ulphilas was adapting his spelling from Greek anyway)... but this is another story.

JDM


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