Goths, Naming and Ablaut

[Hans-Werner Hatting]

[ moderator edited ]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 00:48:27 EST X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>This raises a question about naming conventions.  If the Gothic name were
>taken from flood, river or the abstract pouring forth of genes, what would
>be the expected form that name would take?
(snip)
>Wouldn't naming from a verb form (the "flooded ones", the "poured" or
>"spouting" ones or however else this is translated) result in the use >of
>the past participle?  And in that case, wouldn't we expect something like
>OE pp <goten>?  And if I am doing this right, in  Gothic, the past
>participle of the strong verb <giotan> (pour) would be <gitans>?

I would expect _gutans_ , which would correspond to the OE form. We have the
ablaut row PIE *eu-ou-u, which gives Gothic iu-au-u, and we would expect
zero degree in the participle. If this were the past participle, we would,
of course, expect some passive meaning from a transitive verb like _giutan_.

>If on the other hand <*gauta-> simply refers to a place of origin (e.g.,
>the region of the Gaut River) I suppose we would expect the genitive plural
>- but then how would the ablaut be involved?  In OE, adjectives referring
>to peoples often get an <-isc> ending.  I'm not sure that anything like
>this occurs in Gothic.

I think we simply should not separate the name of the _Geats_, Götland,
etc., which occur in the area the Goths claimed as their ancestral
homelands, from the other attested forms. Here we have *Gauta- (don't
remember if this form is attested), while in other sources we have
_Guto:n-_. To add to the confusion, the Polish place names _Gdan'sk_,
_Gdynia_ (on the shore of the Baltic sea) are normally etymologised as
containing an element *gud- referring to the Goths. (The /d/ might be due to
an assimilation of /t/ to the initial /g/ after the dropping of the back yer
< /u/ - but the Slavic languages normally prefer regressive asimilation.)
Normally, in Gmc. concretising n-stem Substantives to o-stem adjectives are
formed without change of ablaut degree. So we may have an irregular
formation here, or maybe both the adjective *gauta- and the ethnonym
*Guto:n- go back to an ablauting root noun. All of this is speculative, and
doesn't tell us anything on the meaning of the name _Goth_.

>Another thing perhaps worth mentioning is I think neither the words
><gauta-> nor <guton-> appear in any full Gothic text record.  In later
>inscriptions the Goths appear to be calling themselves <Gothi> --
>apparently using the Latin name.

Latin inscriptions, I presume?

One aside here: I dimly remember that there were debates on whether Gothic
_au_ represented /au/ or /o(:)/. The traditional opinion is that in certain
positions, e.g. before /r/, it is realised as /o/, and then it is
transcribed as _aú_ in the text editions. Otherwise, it is assumed to have
been realised as /au/. But the distinction _aú_ and _au_ was introduced by
the modern editors; in the original texts the same letter is used. I don't
remember the arguments which were brought forward to support the
distinction, but I remember I did not find them very convincing. So might it
be possible that Gmc. */au/ had already become /o:/ in Ulfila's time, and
that Latin _Gothi_ represents *_Gauta- _?

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting