Reference on Numbers of Saxons

[Herb Stahlke]

This is very much a minor note to this thread, but last summer in
my HEL course, a Saudi student who is specialized in early Islamic
scholarship mentioned that Arabic documents dealing with the 8th
c. Muslim invasions of the Iberian Peninsula mention fighting
against Goths.  I wonder what the term might have referred to at
that time.

Herb Stahlke

Someone wrote:

> On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally
> linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords,
> little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance.  In fact, it
> was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim
> invasions.  It lasted much better in the Crimea!