Antes?

[ualarauans]

Hails, Mixael!

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Michael Erwin <merwin at ...> wrote:
>
> I'm not convinced 'Antes' is an ethnonym. The name comes from  
> Jordanes, after all.
> 
> If the root is Gothic, any Ans- Ant- or Anth- could yield 'Antes' 
in  
> transliteration.
> 
> If the root is not Gothic, some other forms might also do so.
> 
> (Ni quotha inuh Gutrazda ei meljo in razdai mainon)
>

At first I too had doubts if it were not another Gothic word left 
untranslated in Getica, but note that, besides Jordanes, Antes are 
mentioned by Procopius of Caesarea (hYPER TWN POLEMWN LOGOI, V.27.2 
et passim, especially a longer fragment about this tribe VII.14.22-
30 - he has the name as ANTAI), Menander (Fr. 6 where the ANTAI are 
reported to get destroyed by Avares), Mauricius (STRATHGIKON, XI.3, 
4: advice how to wage war against the ANTAI, just in case, with a 
very detailed description of  the probable adversaries) and others 
more. Very difficult to believe all the authors borrowed it from 
Jordanes. But can we be quite sure that it was just this ethnonym 
which produced the known Germanic forms: OE _ent_ "giant", OHG 
_enz_ "idem" (after G. Koebler). And is the adjective OS 
_entisc_ "huge", OLFr, OHG _entisk _ "old" formed from the same 
stem? Koebler explains them in different ways (OS < PG 
*antjaz "giant", OLFr, OHG < PG *andjaz "end", dependent on meaning 
I guess). If so, why OLFr not *endisk? If nevertheless it's from 
*antjaz too - why OHG not *enzisk? Maybe it's a Low-to-High German 
loan, or vice versa?
Whatever it be, for our ends it would be interesting to know if the 
semantics of the word mutated from ethnonym to "giant" (a very well-
spread change) already in Gothic, so that this word (pl. 
*Antjos:*Anteis) could be reconstructed in the latter meaning. 
Jordanes describes them as rather serious opponents of the Gothic 
war power (Get. 247: ...dum adgreditur prima congressione superatus, 
deinde etc...).
The name itself is usually thought to be Iranian derived from the 
same IE base ant- "limit", "end", which produced PG *andjaz, so 
Antes could have meant roughly the same as Marcomanni or nowaday's 
Ukrainians.

Ualarauans






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