"Goth"

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2000 00:40:46 EST, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>Basically, the word "Goth" apparently clearly first appears in Greek about
>250BC.  That is when it is applied to the "Goths" just north of the Danube.
>It seems that in Greek at this earlier time, it is written <Guto:nes> or
><Guthoi>.

>In a number of places I see the word reconstructed as from <*Gutos>, sing.,
><*Gutans> pl. (with <t> rather than <thorn>.)  I don't know when this
>reconstruction would date to.

Essentially to Gothic as we know it (Ulfila's Gothic).  Both forms are
plurals, the first in case we had an o-stem sg. *<Gut>, pl. *<Gutos>,
the second for an n-stem sg. *<Guta>, pl. *<Gutans>.  The only
attested Gothic form is <Gut-Tiuda> "Gothia".  I would favour the
n-stem variant.

>In Latin, it will appear about a hundred years after the Greek as pl <Gothi>
>(the way Ulfila's biographer apparently spelled it) and at some point I've
>read, <Gotthi>.

Unlike Latin or Greek /t/, Germanic /t/ was (and is) aspirated.

>Earlier Greek and Latin historians use similar names to refer to people in
>other places who may have been "Goths":  Strabo writing in Greek uses
><Buto:nas> which is often interpreted as a mistake for "Guto:nas", Tacitus
>mentions the <Gotones>, Ptolemy mentions both <Kw'gnoi> and up in Sweden
><Gau'tai> and something that has been Latinized as "Gythones."

<y>=<u>, so that would be Guthones.  The Swedish <Gautai> should be
kept separate.

>The Goths were sometimes also referred to as the <Getae> (Greek: Getes,
>Getae; Latin, Geta, Getae), a name used for an earlier group of people in the
>same area (north of the Danube.)  (The <Geats> appear as another northern
>Germanic peoples at some point later in time.)

The Getae were most likely a Thracian (or Daco-Thracian) people.
There is no likely connection between Germanic *Gut- "Goth", and the
Getae.  The <Ge:ats> of the Beowulf are the Swedish Gautai (OE *au >
e:a).

>Some derive the name from the <Go:eta> or <Go:te> people or section of
>Sweden, Ptolemy's <Gau'tae>.  Ingemar Nordgren has suggested that the name is
>derived from the Goeta River in Sweden (deriving it from Gaut's "aelv").

>There is a claim that early forms of the name appear within the Roman empire
>in two Greek inscriptions from Asia, one using a personal name <<gouththa>>
>the other apparently refering to <<...tes romaion arches gouththton te kai
>germanon ethnon>> (apparently from the late 3d cent AD in Persia.)

>[...]

>And are there vowel shifts in East Germanic that happen somewhere around this
>time that would yield something like /oe/> /u/ or /e/?  And doesn't Latin
>favor <thorn> > /t/?  (E.g., Tacitus - "Tuista")  And how would either /u/ or
>/oe/ or /o/ turn into /ou/ in Greek?  Is there any reason to think /oe/ > /o/
>or /ou/ could happen at this time between Greek or Celtic and Germanic in
>transcribing this word?  Is there a conventional comparative solution for any
>of this?

In Germanic, we have to tribes: the Goths (*Gut-) and the Ge:ats/Go"ts
(*Gaut-).  In Greek, their names would at first have been transcribed
as <Gut(h)ones>/<Gut(h)oi> and <Gaut(h)ones>/<Gaut(h)ai>, then, after
Greek /u/ > /u"/ and /th/ > /T/, more likely as
<Gout(t)ones>/<Gout(t)oi> and <Gaut(t)ones>/<Gaut(t)ai>.

The <o> that we find in Latin <Go(t)thi> can be due to either Gothic
or Latin phonetics: in Gothic manuscripts, short <u> sometimes
alternates with <o> (long /o:/).  In late Latin, short /u/ merged with
long /o:/ as short closed /o/ (/U/) (as opposed to /u:/ > /u/ and /o/
> /O/).  Both processes would have led to Goth. *Guta -> Lat. Gothus,
with close ("long") /o/.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl