century, events, deaths

[ualarauans]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Lombard" <manielombard at ...> wrote:
> 
> That means:
> 
> list of years: jere tal, jeratal
> list of decades: wintrutigiwe tal

Wintrus and jer may both mean "year" in Gothic. But for the sake of 
terminological consistence (if there should be anything like that) 
we'd better standardize the "year"-compounds. Since we need wintrus 
for "winter", its use for "year" may be confined to high style, 
poetry and also the type of adjectives (numeral + wintrus, in the 
meaning "lasting N years") where it is attested (twalibwintrus). In 
this case we are left with jer for everything else, and may 
construct *jera-tal(a) "list of years", *jera-tigus "decade" and 
*jera-hund "century". Not to forget that Gothic is particularly rich 
on this subject and has two more words for "year", ENIAUTOS, in its 
vocabulary – aþn(s) N./M.-a (cognate to Lat. annus < *atnos, only 
dat. pl aþnam is attested in Gal. 4:10) and at-aþni N.-ja (gen. sg. 
ataþnjis in John 18:13). Aþne *tala sounds pretty nice to me.

If we accept *tala for "list", the logical next step would be to 
reconstruct *taljan "to enumerate", "to mention one by one", 
specifically in the expression 'jera taljan' "to narrate what 
happened in the past, year by year", "to tell history", hence nomen 
agentis *jerataljands M.-nd "historiographer", "narrator on 
Discovery Channel/History" or just "historian".

It's just a bunch of raw suggestions. Feel free to disagree with and 
criticize it.

> list of centuries: aiwe (or would it be it aiwje, ja-stem ?) tal, 
or alde (or
> aldje?) tal

aiwe and alde, I think.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20080222/f15ffecd/attachment.htm>