Warrior Class

[ualarauans]

Some thoughts on Gothic knights.

In most European languages (all except English afaik) "knight" 
is "horseman", literally. Although the Goths didn't have knights in 
the proper sense of the word, they did have cavalry. The Ostrogoths 
are said to borrow the practice of the mounted warriorship from 
their Hunnish and Alanic neighbors. They must have had a word for a 
horseman, right? Of course, they could have borrowed the item 
together with the word for it. Not that they had never seen a man 
riding on horseback before they contacted East European nomads. The 
hypothetical loan could refer to some particular kind of cavalry, 
e.g. auxiliary Alans. The problem is we don't know the Alanic or 
Hunnish word either. Modern Ossetic has baræg for "horseman", but I 
don't know if it's not a later loan from some North Caucasian idiom. 
Somehow it doesn't look like inherited Iranian. I'd expect something 
with Ir. aspa- (Oss. jæfs-) as the first element. Maybe the Goths 
would substitute it with their IE cognate aihva-, who knows...

To construct the word from the Germanic vocabulary, I can think of 
substantivized *reidands (declined like frijonds). *Reidareis 
suggested by Llama seems OK, too, only I haven't seen -areis added 
to a strong verb. Which doesn't mean this was absolutely impossible.

Finally, there's an option of "going Romance" and constructing 
*kaballareis M.-ja, after French chevalier, Castilian caballero, 
Italian cavaliere etc. We have Kaballarja attested (in Arezzo deed). 
Personally I like it best. Neo-Gothic lexicographs can load it with 
all that feudal semantics we associate with knights. And there will 
be a diffenece between "knight" (kaballareis) and "horseman" 
(reidands) to be made.

Ualarauans

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