[gothic-l] Old Prussian

Fri Jun 11 13:15:22 UTC 2004

Hi Dirk,

Some other words from the Elbing Glossary (Old Prussian, 14th or 15th 
century). Some look quite like Gothic, or Germanic, at least:

sarwis - armour
catils - kettle
sticlo - glass
rikis - lord
alu - mead
konagis - king
waldwiko - knight

Sticlo, aside from Gothic _stikls_, has cognates in Slavonic.  
According to Terrence Wade's "Russian Etymological Dictionary", these 
do derive ultimately from Gothic, which comes from "a Gmc. root 
meaning sharp" - refering to the point of a drinking horn.  Koebler's 
dictionary has this idea too.

_Catils_ might well be from Gothic *katils (ultimately < Lat. 
catillus).  Czarnecki's article places Polish kocioł among just six 
words which can be ascribed with CERTAINTY to Gothic!

I have read that _alu_ could just as easily be
a Baltic cognate, rather than a borrowing from Germanic necessarily.
Apparently the word, though not attested, did exist in Gothic (as 
*aluth), and is thought to account for similar forms in Caucasian 
languages ("Etymology", ASC Ross).

_Sarwis_ looks like Gothic _sarwa_ 'armour'.  More than that I can't 
say.

_Konagis_ is presumably Germanic, but maybe West Germanic rather than 
Gothic? (see Czarnecki's comments on Polish equivalents).  Waldwico, 
I don't know.  Rugis does seem to be a borrowing, one way or the 
other, but is there any indication for the direction of borrowing?  
Even if it was from Germanic to Baltic/Slavonic, I guess it might not 
be possible to know whether Gothic was implicated.

Re: Polish, yes Czarnecki discounts many supposed Gothic borrowings 
into Polish, although he does consider a Gothic origin PROBABLE for 
the river names: Pełtew (*fultho), Skrwa (*Struko) & Tanew (*Tânu-) - =

sources are cited, but no reasoning/explanation given - and POSSIBLE 
Gothic origin for the name Przeginia (<fairguni), although a native 
Slavic origin for the latter is also considered.  Incidentally, I'd 
be interested to hear if anyone knows any more details about the 
etymology of those rivers, the meaning of the names, or alternative 
derivations.

If *Tânu- is Gothic, that long _â_ looks odd, but I can't really 
comment as there are so many factors here that I don't know about, 
such as Slavonic phonology, or indeed the phonology of East Germanic 
dialects at this early date (e.g. the progress of æ > e, and what 
might have been the closest phoneme in Prussian and in Slavonic) - 
after all this is a long time before Wulfila.  Also it might be 
necessary to consider the possible effects of these names coming into 
Polish through Prussian.

Re: nationalism.  Ugh, politics!  Well, I suppose it's human nature 
for people to see what they want to see.  Equally, of course, the 
fact that someone makes bad arguments in favour of something doesn't 
affect its likelyhood one way or the other, so we just have to look 
at the evidence.  To look at it more generously, I guess this subject 
requires expertise in several different languages, so there's extra 
room for error - even if we ignore mad nationalist amateurs from long 
ago.  I know next to nothing about Polish (so far...) sadly, and only 
very basic stuff about any Slavonic languages - on the other hand 
I've already spotted a few errors in Czarnecki's article regarding 
Gothic itself.

That said, there's nothing inherently impossible about place names 
lasting hundreds of years, and river names are often notoriously 
ancient.  E.g. there are Celtic river names all over England in 
places that have been devoid of Celtic speakers for almost as long as 
Poland has been empty of Goths!

Llama Nom

> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <penterakt at f...> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi all!
> > 
> > Looking up 
> > _fairguni_ just now on Google, I came across this article on the 
> > Gothic contribution to Polish:
> > 
> > www.fh.ug.gda.pl/images/Czarnecki.pdf
> > 
> > In particular I noticed the following comment on a Polish place 
> name 
> > sometimes said to derive from the tribal name recorded in Latin 
as 
> > GREUTINGI.  Czarnecki says here that the place name is of 
Slavonic 
> > rather than East Germanic origin - which means it can't be used 
as 
> > evidence that this tribe was an old grouping going back to Poland.
> > 
> > 10.1.1.7. Grudzi¹dz – eine Ortschaft Solch eine Form geht nicht 
auf 
> > die Bezeichnung eines ostgerm. (got.) Stammes *Ghraudingos (> 
> ostgot. 
> > Grutungi) zurück, sondern, wie die ältere Form Grudzieniec zeigt, 
> ist 
> > sie slawischer Herkunft. Vgl. Kiparsky (1934: 39, 166), Stender-
> > Petersen (1927: 520)
> > 
> > 
> > Llama Nom
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> Hi Llama Nom,
> 
> I think most of the Polish or former East/West Prussian placenames 
> that were at one time believed to be East Germanic/Gothic have 
> nowadays been rejected as such. When most of Northern Poland was 
> German (until 1945) historians were engaged in centuries of debates 
> about ethnicities and the German historians were keen to interpret 
as 
> many placenames as Gothic as they could to show that the land is 
> ancient Germanic. Instead, the names in question are usually Old 
> Prussian (i.e. West Baltic) or old Slavic. Considering that the 
Goths 
> left the region from about 150AD it is close to impossible that any 
> placenames of Gothic origin remained in existence there I think. 
> 
> The older German desire to identify Gothic placenames in East 
Prussia 
> is mirrored by the Lithuanian attempt to link their history with 
the 
> Goths. I remember one (hopeless) Lithunanian author who interpreted 
> many Visigothic names as Lithuanian, in the process of which he 
> seeminly delibrately misread coin inscriptions on Visigothic 
triens. 
> 
> H. Wolfram puts it nicely in his book, when he says that lists of 
> supposedly Gothic placenames and words in Spain and Aquitaine 
usually 
> grow and shrink according to the national disposition of the 
author. 
> If I remember correctly, he said that there is practically no 
> archaeolgical evidence of the Goths' stay in western Gaul yet, some 
> people believe to detect all sorts of Gothic placenames, while 
others 
> argue that none of them are Gothic. 
> 
> However, I believe that there might be Gothic loanwords in the 
> extinct Old Prussian language, which are not fully studied yet. For 
> example: 
> 
> Old Prussian  - English
> 
> Rijks        - lord (Gothic: Reiks)
> Rugis        - rye (name of the Rugi tribe)
> Russ         - horse (m.Germ.: Ross)
> Brunja       - armour (Gothic: brunjo)
> 
> etc....
> 
> Cheers
> Dirk  
> 
>

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