About Villemann og Magnhild

[llama_nom]

Hails, Rydwlf!

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Rydwlf <mitsuhippon at ...> wrote:
>

> - For "fagraste" I have used Go. fagrs in superlative grade,
masculine gender (see later), vocative case. As it's an a-stem, it
could take both -iz -ist or -oz -ost for the comparative and
superlative. From comparison with other pure a-stem roots, I've chosen
-ist, but I don't know if there should be other factors to take into
account. For the moment, I have here "fagrists".


No way of knowing that Go. 'fagrs' didn't have this meaning too, as in
the other Germanic languages, but it's only attested with the meaning
"fit, suitable, useful":  nih du airþai, ni du maihstau fagr ist "it
is fit neither for the earth nor the dungheap".  The negative
'unfagrs' is also attested just once, meaning "ungrateful": unte is
gods ist þaim unfagram jah unseljam "for he is kind to the unthankful
and the evil".  Instead, the adjective skauns* is used for
"beautiful".  Probably an i-stem, cf. Finnish 'kaunis', but from the
forms attested in Gothic there's nothing to rule out the possibility
of its being a ja-/jo-stem: skauneis*.

On the question of -i- or -o- in comparatives and superlatives of
a-stems, the only tendency that I'm aware of is that with the
exception of 'hlasoza' (see Streitberg 188, Note 1 [
http://www.wulfila.be/lib/streitberg/1920/HTML/B131.html ]), all the
-o- forms have long roots:

frodozans
swinþoza
usdaudoza
lasiwostai
armostai

hlasoza

But given the small number of examples, this might be a coincidence. 
Not all a-stems with long roots take the -o- forms:

hauhistins
managizo
jûhiza

fawizo
raþizo? (positive unattested)

Your choice of 'fagrists' would be in keeping with Old Norse, which
shows i-umlaut.


> - For "lindelauvi" I have found in Tunstall: lindabaums (sm.)
"lime-tree, linden" (there's no entry in Wright's Glossary or
Streitberg's Dictionary for this). I think that the correct spelling
in Go. should be "lindabagms" if I'm not wrong. It is masculine so
that makes "fagrists" go in masculine.


I should have marked 'linda-bagms' as a reconstruction; sorry about
that.  The simplex *linda, sf. is given in Gerhard Köbler's Gotisches
Wörterbuch, based on the Spanish personal names Lendo and Lentimil.


> - For "alle" meaning "of all", I have used the Gen.pl.m. of "alls" :
"alláize".
> 
> So the sentence would go "Sái fagrists lindabagms alláize".
> 
> 3. For the word "golden harp" that appears in some parts of the
song, I have come to the Go. translation "gulþaharpa". For this I have
based on "gulþ" (Wright: sn. "gold") and "harpa" (Tunstall: sf.
"harp"; not found in Wright or Streitberg).


*harpa is a reconstruction, not attested in the surviving Gothic
corpus, but appears as a loanword in Italian, Provencal, French,
Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese.  Again, I must have forgotten to mark
it as a reconstruction.  Thanks for drawing my attention to that!  I
would have got it from Gerhard Köbler's Gotisches Wörterbuch, but by
comparison with forms in other Germanic languages, a better
reconstruction would probably be *harpo, weak f.


> From this, according to the word-formation rules and being "gulþ" an
a-stem, the final vowel of the first element should remain (see
Wright's "Grammar of the Gothic Language", par. 389), thus
"gulþaharpa" (also compare with "áiz", sn., "copper" -> "áizasmiþa",
"coppersmith").


Agreed.


> 
> 4. For the verb "to play", you know already that there is no
attested Gothic word for it, being the most similar the verb "swiglon"
(wv. 2) with the meaning "to play the pipe". I was thinking here in
trying to reconstruct a Gothic word akin to the one "play" comes from:
OE "plegian" (Bright's "Old English Dictionary": (w.II) 1. play. 2.
contend, fight"), but this proved too hard for me and I was not sure
if the meaning of "perform music" was already present in the OE word
or was a later added meaning. Then I turned to study the word used in
the song, "slå". In Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Icelandic ("slá")
one of the common meanings is "to hit", and in a Danish dictionary I
even found "to beat", which I think can be related to the style of
playing the harp as "beating" or "pinching" the harp strings. Akin to
this both in meaning and sound I consider the verb "slahan" (sv.VI) a
good substitute.


OE 'plegian' is attested with the sense of to play a musical
instrument, with the instrument being in the instrumental case (or
later dative); according to the OED, it isn't till the 18th c. that
the earliest examples of 'play' used transitively with the name of an
instrument are found; Early Modern English has 'play on/at/of". 
'slahan' seems quite reasonable though, and might be a safer bet. 
Good luck with the rest of the song!


> 
> As told before, I'd like to read your opinions about this. If you
also want to propose a translation, that would be perfect for me...
Eager to read your comments, and giving thanks to you on advance,
> 
> Rydwlf
> 
> PS . There's a list of alternate versions and variations of this
song in
http://www.dokpro.uio.no/ballader/lister/tsbalfa_titler/tittel_314a.html
> (Documentation Project by the Universities of Norway)
> 
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