[gothic-l] Latin influence on Gothic

[llama_nom]

> Did you say that there was no German word for "Greeks" before 350
CE?  Wow! Is that must from runic evidence? And that must be
Scandanavian. Maybe that is too far west. Still, what a shocking
omission. It disappoints me to learn that there were no German
stories of Persians or Parthians, no references to Cyrus or Darius
and their trans Danube forays. Is written Slavonic as old as Gothic
(4th C)? Since it is more Eastern it might include some stories of
Greeks and Persians. What sort of written language existed on the
Eurasian plains?


Hails Jim!

Au contraire - belay that disappointment! - I was actually casting
doubt on a theory that seemed to depend on this assumption.  It was
suggested that the <k> in Gothic <Kreks> is due to a borrowing from
Alemannic, due to Alemannic devoicing of [g] > [k], but I doubt this
because:

1. I think the High German sound shifts were probably too late to
account for the Gothic word.

2. There was no voiced velar stop in Proto Germanic either.  If the
word had been borrowed at this time, [k] might well have seemed
closer to Latin [g] than the Germanic voiced velar fricative.

3. As you say: why the hell not?!  All those contacts with the Roman
world, and no word for 'Greek' would be very strange.  Also in
support of the idea that Kreks represents an early borrowing is Old
English Crecas.  This is accounted for in Campbell's OE Grammar as an
early borrowing for the reasons in (2).


I'm not sure how old the earliest Slavonic texts are, but some
centuries after Wulfila.



> I think the first Gothic intrusions into the Roman Empire occur
during the reign of Decius, late third century in the part of Moesia
that includes the Danube delta, King Cniva led the Goths. By then
though they are also reported to have become established in the lower
Dnieper valley (well within the Ukraine). They could have come down
the Danube and up the Dnieper. By the time of Claudius II, Gothicus,
the Gothic fleet he defeated had come from all along the Black Sea up
the Danube to the Iron Gate as well as into the Mediterranean. Most
of the city states along the Black Sea were established centuries
earlier as Greek trading posts by the Agean city-state of Miletus in
the time of Cyrus, and as such they had retained their Greek
language. I suspect Claudius used scorpions as well as other weapons
against his Gothic opponents much as Marcus Aulelius had used them
against the Marcomanni.


Yeah, it would be bizarre if they had no name for Greeks in everyday
use.  I'm not sure of the details, but I think there is some evidence
for Greek trade with Scandinavia, quite possibly via the Goths.  If I
remember right, Looijenga in 'Runes Around the North Sea' mentions
somewhere a "crystal bullet" with gnostic signs on it, found in
Denmark!  Hmm, now what would that be used for...



> Your comment about the military as a Latin bastion sounds
convincing though; Marcelinus, a Greek in the Roman Army, wrote in
Latin, didn't he. Maybe,however, the Latin influence is related to
the fact that Wulfilas was using Greek biblical sources and somehow
as part of the translation process he reverted to Latin grammars when
Germanic failed him??? Yikes, thin ice!


The translator must have been pretty familiar with idiomatic Gothic I
think.  It would have been quite easy for someone with more knowledge
of Latin than Gothic to follow the Latin practice of using accusative
of motion and dative of rest with IN and ANA.  This would not have
been ungrammatical in Gothic either.  But instead, dative is often
also used for motion/direction - "into", "onto" in the Gothic Bible -
a permitted variation in Gothic apparently, as in Old English, but
not in Latin.  The trickiness of this difference can be seen in the
insertion to the Codex Brixianus, written in Latin, but of presumed
Gothic authorship.  Here, dative appears after SECUNDUM "according
to", where Latin ought to have an accusative.  The theory is, that
the writer was thinking of Gothic AFAR, which would take dative when
used with that meaning.

On the other hand, things like the -US ending, and a word like
SKAURPJO, don't involve any grammatical tanglments.  If the words had
been unfamiliar, they could just have been left in their Greek
forms.  I guess the -us could have developed from Greek -os if
borrowed at an early enough date.  Also some of the Latin influence
might have come in later that Wulfila, nearer to the time of the
manuscripts.  Or the original translator could have consulted Latin
translations as well - I think there is some evidence for this, but I
don't know the details.  But probably there were a few Latin words
already in Gothic, for whatever reason - along with some Slavonic
ones.

I still don't know what to make of Kordtland's statement that Gothic
is phonetically more like Latin than other Germanic languages
though...

Llama Nom



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