Etymological inquiry

[Guenther Ramm]

Hails, Gerry!
  Thanks a lot for your reply. That example in Hamðismál 30 is really significant. It seems noteworthy that both here and in the Gothic Bible the contexts are similar: there’s an opposition “today” – “tomorrow” (“þótt skylim nú eða í gær deyja” resp. “himma daga wisando jah gistradagis in auhn galagiþ”), maybe it’s just this circumstance under which these “non-typical” semantics could come to effect. I mean there could be a case of a steady formula of the archaic “poetic speech” here. As you know it often made words in such formulas retain their obsolete meanings, as “adjacent day” in this example. Were it so, then we could presume Gothic gistradagis to be bisemantic, i.e. to mean both “tomorrow” and “yesterday”, and what’s more, the latter meaning could be quite “normal” and usual in daily speech (= the situation in other Germanic languages, and not only Germanic since Latin heri, hesternus seem to belong hither too). The only reason then why we miss its attestation would
 be the lack of proper fragments in the survived texts.
   
  Ualarauans
   
  P.S. Note that the both contexts contain a reference to the presence of a numinal power (“eftir kvið norna” resp. “guþ swa wasjiþ”), hence *gestra- as “tomorrow” – a feature of the sacral vocabulary? Besides, compare the numbers (Hamðismál) 30:6 vs. (Matthew) 6:30 – there’s something weird about all this :)


Grsartor at aol.com wrote:  About the meaning of "gistradagis":

I, too, used to wonder whether some mistake had been made by the translator 
from Greek. However, the word, which occurs only in Matt 6:30, clearly cannot 
in its context mean "yesterday", and the Greek word it translates is in no way 
obscure. According to Lehmann (A Gothic Etymological Dictionary)  "the meaning 
in Germanic must have been 'adjacent day' ". He points out that a vaguely 
similar phrase in Old Icelandic, "i gaer", though normally meaning "yesterday", 
was used in Hamdismal 30:6 with the sense "tomorrow". So despite the obvious 
similarity to OE giestrandaeg and OHG gesteren it looks as if the Gothic 
"gistradagis" was correctly used to mean "tomorrow".

Gerry T.


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