[gothic-l] Re: To Dirk and Tore

[malmqvist52 at YAHOO.SE]

Hi Albareiks
--- In gothic-l at y..., "sunburst" <sunburst at j...> wrote:
> >Puh, long sentence to read- Is this prooved? Could you please give 
me
> >the reference for this? Could you also please explain what you mean
> >by "metaphysically or through ancient folk etymology"? How would it
> >be different from "normal ethymology"
> 
> 
> See the _Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture_ edited by JP Malory 
and DQ
> Adams, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999. 
Could you, just briefly, hint or discuss what evidence they give for 
their theories on the words god and Gaut? I'm working quite hard in 
Riksgränsen right now and there is a long way to the library, just 
now.
As I might have hinted before I'm quite sceptical to the theories of 
the Indo-european theoreticists. Not that I doubt that there really 
exist IE roots in our langiages. But I read in e. g. the gothic 
textbook from the swedish(Lund) publisher Studentlitteratur that 
about one third of the lexical items in the germanic languages are 
not of indo-european origin. I e listed as of obscure origin( or just 
germanic) in ethymological dictionaries.
The dictionary I have "Våra ord" Elias wessen and Nordstedts Ordbok 
1997  says( translated into e.):

"fsv gu(th)( I assume it's a d-lisp-sound really, my remark). isl. gud
(lisp-sound),gud(lisp-sound, I shoud get som transription fonts)n.; 
common germ. word of obscure origin; possibly participle to an indo-
european root with the meaning "call, call upon""

This view seem to me more balanced than the one from the Indo-
european dictionary, but of course, I haven't heard their evidence 
yet.
  By folk etymology I mean that
> ancient people had neither lingusitics books and courses nor 
etymological
> dictionaries, and therefore in ancient times, for example, two 
similar words
> which actually came from different roots could be missunderstood to 
have
> been either the same word or related, and therefore used 
interchangeably.
> Through folk etymology (meaning usually incorrect etmology, at 
least from a
> technical perspective), two unrelated words could come to mean the 
same
> thing in the ancient usage.  While such would be incorrect for the 
modern
> scholar, who knows the roots, it would have been correct to the 
ancient
> people who used the words and did not know the roots.

Thanks for the explanation

Best regards 
Anders




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