Comparing languages. Examples [gothic-l]

[cstrohmier at YAHOO.COM]

Hi Francisc,
	You mention a Gothic Mission in Bavaria and an influx of 
Goths into Bavaria after the fall of the Ostrogothic Kingdom as the 
sources of features common to Gothic and Bavarian.   This raises 
complicated questions.  I would like to skip for now the question of 
the sources of these common features, and look instead at the Goths 
and their influx into Bavaria.
	I read an article once, I think it was an article on Bavaria 
in the Encyclopedia Britannica, possibly a 1970's or 1980's edition, 
and it said that when Odoacer swept down from the North on his way to 
Rome (c. 476), he passed through Bavaria, and he and his 
troops "devastated" and "virtually depopulated" the region.  This 
seems to me to be an important point, for it creates a problem for 
Odoacer, and for his successor, Theodoric.  (Theodoric, King of the 
Ostrogoths, invaded Italy in 488, and he established the Ostrogothic 
Kingdom in 493.  He died in 526; his kingdom lasted until about 
555.)  Odoacer and Theodoric could not leave a "devastated" 
and "virtually depopulated" province undefended, for there were 
powerful tribes like the Franks nearby who would move in and take it, 
and perhaps use it as stepping stone into Italy.
	Odoacer probably stationed some troops there to keep other 
tribes out; no doubt Theodoric expelled them when he took power, and 
stationed troops of his own there for the same reasons, to keep other 
tribes out.  Since the Ostrogoths were able to keep Bavaria a part of 
the kingdom for its duration, the soldiers they sent to Bavaria would 
have brought their families with them, and no doubt, there were also 
government officials, merchants and others, with their families.
	It seems probable that when the Goths originally left their 
Baltic home, their formed alliances with other tribes, and the Goths 
together with their allies were known collectively as the Goths.  The 
Ostrogothic Kingdom probably also consisted of both Goths and their 
allies.  There is reason to believe that Theodoric may have divided 
Bavaria into administative zones and assigned Goths and their allies 
to administer these zones.  (In a previous e-mail to Gothic List, 
Dirk pointed out about the East Germanic Skiri in Bavaria, and that 
at least one Bavarian duke was a Herul.  There were also Vandals, 
among others.)  It seems to me that these developments must have 
taken place very early in the Ostrogothic Kingdom, before the 
Bavarians moved in.  (The Bavarians are believed to have moved in 
during the period of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, between 493-555.)
	Even with the Gothic movements (mentioned above) into 
Bavaria, the population of Bavaria would still have been very sparse, 
and therefore, still inviting attack from neighboring tribes.  
Theodoric's Ostrogoths were already spread out dangerously thin; he 
needed to find a tribe to settle in Bavaria which would be loyal to 
him, which cancels out the Marcomanni.  St.  Ambrose (c. 340-397), 
Bishop of Milan, had converted to Marcomanni to Roman Catholicism 
before the end of the fourth century; the nearby Franks had converted 
to Roman Catholicism under Clovis, on Christmas Day, 496, three years 
after Theodoric established the Ostrogothic Kingdom.  Allowing 
Catholic Marcomanni into Bavaria would have invited an alliance 
between them and the Catholic Franks, which could have created a 
dangerous problem for the Ostrogoths, especially with regard to the 
native Catholic population of Italy.  (Incidentally, when St. Rupert, 
the Apostle of Bavaria, and other Celtic and Frankish missionaries 
came to Bavaria near the end of the seventh century, they found the 
Bavarians were mostly pagan with a few Arians among them:  Clearly 
the Bavarians were not the descendents of the Catholic Marcomanni.)  
The partially Arianized, mostly pagan, East Germanic Bavarians were 
clearly an ideal choice for Theodoric.  (I mentioned in a previous e-
mail to Gothic-List that J. Zibermayr wrote in his book:  "Noricum:  
Bayern und Osterreich", that the Bavarians are an East German people; 
Zibermayer's position is widely referred to in respected sources 
ranging from the German encyclopedia "Der Grosse Brockhaus" to 
the "New Catholic Encyclopedia."  [From this it seems reasonable to 
conclude that the Bavarian tongue may also be East Germanic.])
	No doubt, when the southern part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom 
began to fall, the Goths withdrew into the northern parts of their 
kingdom, which they continued to hold, and which were easier to 
defend.  And they had good reason too:  There had previously been 
massacres of unarmed Gothic women and children in Italy and of Gothic 
men, women, and children in Constantinople.  As the East Romans 
retook Italy, they deported the captured Goths back east, where they 
were put the men on the front lines of a Roman battle with (the 
Persians?) where they were slaughtered in large numbers.  The 
Ostrogoths really didn't have much choice; it was either withdraw to 
Bavaria or die.  (This would mean that the Ostrogoths were asborbed 
by the East Germanic Bavarians.)  Together they seem to have allied 
themselves with the Franks, which effectively discouraged the East 
Romans from crossing the Alps.  Later they came more fully under the 
control of the Franks. The Frankish domination would explain the 
gradual suppression of Arianism.
	The thought occured to me that Dirk's Pfahlheim Horse 
Warriors, who were East Germanic, pagan, and under Merovingian 
control, may well have been an outpost of the Bavarians. 
	My point in all of this is, that the experts you cite say 
that the Gothic influence in Bavaria occured as a result of either a 
Gothic Mission to Bavaria or as a result of Gothic settlement in 
Bavaria after the fall of the southern part of the Ostrogothic 
Kingdom, and I think it is more complicated than this.
Cory
	

Hi Francisc, 
	I hope to take up your other two points concerning the Gothic 
influx into Bavaria and the Gothic influence on Old Bavarian in a 
future posting.
Cory  

On Thu, 26 Jul 2001 13:41:25 -0000 cstrohmier at yahoo.com writes:
> --- In gothic-l at y..., "Francisc Czobor" <czobor at c...> wrote:
> Hi Cory,
> 
> Regarding the relationship of Gothic with OHG, especially Old 
> Bavarian, I wrote largerly in an earlier message to this list (no. 
> 2225). This relationship is however interpreted not through a 
Gothic 
> 
> origin of OHG or Old Bavarian, but rather of a Gothic influence, 
> that 
> was explained in two ways:
> 1. OHG owes a series of loanwords to Gothic, respectively to the
> Gothic mission and its influence on the High German, especially 
> Bavarian church language. 
> 2. According to other sources, since a Gothic mission in Bavaria is 
> not historically attested and few probable, having in view the 
> tolerance of the Arian-Gothic Christianity, the relations between 
> Gothic and southern OHG (especially O. Bav.) are more probably due 
> to 
> the influence of Gothic-Christian population groups on the mixed 
> people of the Bavarians, that appeared suddenly about A.D. 500. 
> Probably that after the defeat of the Ostrogoths in Italy, some of 
> their remnants migrated northwards and participated in the 
> ethnogenesis of the Bavarian people, giving them some words and the 
> legend of Theodoric the Great (which became Dietrich von Bern in 
the 
> 
> German mediaeval epic).
> 
> With best regards,
> 
> Francisc
> --- End forwarded message ---
> 
> 


--- In gothic-l at y..., "Francisc Czobor" <czobor at c...> wrote:
> Hi Cory,
> 
> --- In gothic-l at y..., cstrohmier at y... wrote:
> > Hi Francisc,
> > 	Concerning the word "attila", if I remember correctly, it is 
> > unattested in Gothic:
> 
> Indeed, it is unattested in the surviving Gothic texts, but the 
> diminutive of atta "father" in Gothic could be only "attila", since 
> "-ila" is the regular diminutive suffix in Gothic.
> 
>   In other words, we don't know for sure what 
> > the Goths called Attila the Hun.  Since the word Etzel (Attila) 
is 
> > attested in Middle High German, perhaps the word is of Old High 
> > German origin, or as I said before, a shared word.
> 
> But his name was attested also by contemporary sources, in the 
forms 
> Attila or Athila. At that time (5th century) it's hard to speak 
about 
> Old High German, in the best case what the German linguists are 
> calling "Voralthochdeutsch". In several sources I read this 
> interpretation, that Attila means "little father" in Gothic, with 
two 
> explanations:
> - this was the nickname given to the Hunish king by his East 
Germanic 
> subjects;
> - this was the Gothicization of the real name of the Hunish king.
>  
> > ... 
> > 	It is an unproven assumption that all of the words and 
> > structures common to Gothic and Old Bavarian are Gothic loans to 
Old 
> > Bavarian.  
> 
> It is not my assumption, I found it in all the sources that are 
> discussing this subject, for instance:
> [1] Stefan Sonderegger: Althochdeutsche Sprache und Literatur, de
> Gruyter, Berlin - New York, 1987
> [2] Werner König: DTV-Atlas zur deutschen Sprache, Deutscher 
> Taschenbuch Verlag, München, 1996
> [3] Günther Drosdowski: DUDEN Etymologie - He
rkunftswörterbuch der
> deutschen Sprache, Duden Verlag, Mannheim - Leipzig - Wien -
Zürich,
> 1989
> [4] Virgil Stefanescu-Draganesti: Introduction to the Comparative
> Grammar of the Germanic Languages, University of Bucharest, 1971
> [5] Johann Wolf: Banater deutsche Mundartenkunde, Kriterion Verlag,
> Bukarest, 1987
> 
> Old High German, especially Old Bavarian, and Gothic not 
> > only share a number of general vocabulary words, they also share 
> some 
> > unique structure words, such as pronouns (which are rarely 
borrowed) 
> > and some inflectional endings; these unique sharings are 
connected 
> to 
> > the very structure of the language, and are shared with no other 
> > Germanic language.  I would add that there are many other general 
> > vocabulary words, structure words, and inflections of Old High 
> > German, especially Old Bavarian, which are very near or identical 
to 
> > Gothic, but which are not considered as a sign of special 
> > relationship, since they are also shared with many other Germanic 
> > tongues.  This may be necessary from a scholarly point of view, 
but 
> > it is also misleading.
> 
> This fact could be explained also by the assimilation of Goths by 
the 
> ancestors of Bavarians, the Bavarian dialect of OHG having thus in 
> part a Gothic substratum.
> Nevertheless, OHG, including Old Bavarian, remains a West Germanic 
> language, being separated from Gothic by major definitory 
> characteristics shared with other West Germanic languages, and some 
of 
> them also with the North Germanic languages, as for instance:
> - the rhotacism Gmc. z > r; in Gothic z is preserved or changed in 
s.
> - the shift of IE and Gmc e: > a:; in Gothic the IE/Gmc long e is 
> preserved.
> - the loss of "-ð-" in Gmc. *feðwo:r/*feður- "four". Only
in Gothic 
it 
> is preserved: Wulfilan fidwor/fidur-, Crimean fyder. All the West 
and 
> North Germanic languages have lost it: OHG fior, Germ.&Dutch vier, 
> W.Fris. fjouwer, N.Fris. sjauer, OE feower, Eng. four, ON
fiórer, 
> Icel. fjórir/fjórar/fjögur, Norw.&Danish fire, Swedish
fyra, 
Gutnish 
> fiaurum/fiugur.
> These two phonetic features are in my view major differentiating 
> criteria, creating a gap between Gothic (East Germanic in general), 
on 
> one side, and West and North Germanic, on the other side, so that 
even 
> languages like Old Bavarian and Old Gutnish, that appear to have 
some 
> special relationship with Gothic, can not be considered as East 
> Germanic languages or descendants of Gothic.
> 
> Francisc


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