"Goth"

[Eduard Selleslagh]

At 12:54 12/12/00 -0600, you wrote:

>        I don't have much of a contribution to make here, but since when has
>that ever stopped me?  Besides, my adoring public (the hithertofore
>unsuspected existence of which Mr. Whting was kind enough to point out to
>me) demands it, no doubt.
>        Latin does not of course in any meaningful sense have /th/ (thorn),
>so the appearance of "th" in Latin must be, if all is in order, from
>transliteration from Greek.  The Greeks, for their part, might well have
>heard an aspirated /t/ in Gothic as equivalent to their /th/.  Our modern
>English pronunciation is of course a spelling pronunciation. Thus the
>illusion of a shifted /t/ might be created.  But the Lithuanian borrowed
>form has /d/, indicating that only a /d/ to /t/ shift is real.

[Ed]

But in Spanish they are called 'Godos', which seems to be a voicing of the t.
This is not unusual in Spanish: Latin -atus > -ado, for instance.

[snip]

>                                                            Dr. David L. White

Ed. Selleslagh