[gothic-l] Re: Name origin and meaning

[M. Carver]

jdm314 at aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 6/4/00 5:39:06 PM, you wrote:
>
> <<Why should academicians be expected to rely at all on any Gothic written
> on-line by the same people who make these flagrant and disgraceful errors in
> basic English?   David Hewitt   dhewitt26 at hotmail.com>>
>
> Why should academicians be expected to rely on any Gothic written on line at
> all? It's not as if we're all friends of Ulphilas or something. Writing in
> Gothic basically boils down to a game. An intellectual and, yes, academic
> game, but a game none the less. I think frankly that the vast majority of
> serious scholars would have more problems with the idea of composing in
> Gothic at all than with the idea of hastily wrote and pourly edited e-mail.
>     This is not to say that no one on this list is a serious scholar, but my
> impression is that generally speaking the bigger someone is in an academic
> field, the less interested they are in such games.
>
> Sincerely,
> IUSTIENSU

Sadly this may be true. At least they don't let us know about their
secret scrawlings of Gothic and Pre-Germanic on their lecture notes, or
that they write in runic alphabets in their journals. Scholars of this
sort belong to the 19th century and first half of the 20th century I
think, for they had always a more romantic view of things. Massmann is
one example. Of course it is pure folly to think that we can reconstruct
the environment and details of a natural language, and we do not mix
this with scholarship and study. Hearing and reading the gothic language
is a kind of sensorial encounter, valuable in some sense but subject to
the science of the linguist and historian.

Cheers,
Matþaius

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