Crimean Gothic

[Cristian Mocanu]

I am extremely sorry. I hadn't realized that the original posing on this
thread was about de Busbecq's recordings of CG. I thought Diamond's article
meant another CG set of etyma. I have never read the original de Busbecq
letter in its entirety until now.(thanks, Steve Gustafson). So, a thousand
pardons!!!
     However, my original question about the "men" still stands.
        It is clear now that De Busbecq  made the etyma sound more
German/Low German than they probably did.
         Here is some of the "hard stuff" Diamond left out, with the
original Latin equivalents and my somewhat amateurish comments (Feciunt
meliora potentes!)
       I'll start with the two for which one may invoke Hungarian, just as
Diamond did for "menus"
            Iel= vita sive sanitas cf. Hung. "el"=he/she/it lives;
"elo"=living
           Atochta=malum "-ta" appears to be an adjectival suffix.thus, for
"atoch-" cf. Hung "atok"=curse

            Then::
             Kilemschkop=ebibe calicem, can actually be de-composed into
"kilemsch kop" "kil"=cf. Engl. kill" could have meant smth. like "finish",
"terminate"
               Baar=puer, cf. Scand. "barn", Engl.dial."barn" =child (ren)
[not so hard, that one, really]
               Lista=parum;, i.e. lis-ta; lis-cf. Grmanic "lik"
               There are 2 etyma, also left out by Diamond, which display
the kind of incredible similarity that usually provide a temptation for
far-too-amateurish explanations (the likelihood of which is questionable
pending some consistent linguistic or historic "endorsement")
            Fers=vir; cf. Irish, fir, far
            ich malthata=ego dico; malthata,cf.Norw. maal=language
              One quick thing about  "gadeltha". Could it be that the "g"
here is De Busbecq's way of  transcribing some sort of initial glottal stop?
Then it would be fair to paralell it with German "Adel,
edel"=noble.(with-tha as an adjectival suffix).
               Once again, sorry for my previous message!
                                      Best regards,
                                           cristian