[gothic-l] Russ/ross

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Matþaius wrote:
>Hails
>
>The element rus- in names seems to meen rust or rusty color; perhaps
>referring to 'reddish' hair? cf. Rosomil, Rosmunda, Rosamunda, Rosamud,

Rosamunde or Roswitha (not uncommon German woman's names) are supposed
to derive from a word hroth = fame + ending protection/strong.
An English name like Roger also derives from a root meaning fame
( < Hrothgar). A Scandinavian variant is Roar.


>Rosamoni < *Rusamals? *Rusamunda (, *Rusamods), *Rusamunan. At least we know
>of Go. rauþs and rusma, both meaning red. Another possibility which Koebler
>overlooks (perhaps for good reason?) but I find intriguing is the nymic
>element Raus 'fame', as in Rausimodus. This at least seems much more in
>keeping with naming tradition; often this au "diphthong" is seen in latinic
>transcriptions as 'o'.


>The goths, at least of Wulfila's era, used the word 'marhs' to indicate
>horse, though certain types of horses had specific names, e.g. Guta "Gothic"
>(perhaps not used by the Goths themselves), Bala "Blaze" whence Byzantine
>Bala's. 'Aihvs' was known (cf. Lat. equus, OE eoh) but mainly as the name of
>the rune E.
>
In Norway Jostein and Jofrid are not uncommon.
Jór m. = horse would then be the same as *ehwaz, equus, hippos, etc..

I don't know how much of these names are/were related to the sex of the horse,
its type (workhorse, riding horse etc) or perhaps color (blakk).

Maybe we here have an opportunity to test the usefulness of Winfred
Lehmann's book:

ON             Gothic
ross/hross -> nothing
jor -> A 67 =  *aihvatundi = a prickly bush????
merr -> nothing
hestr -> nothing

So, in this case it doesn't seem useful at all.
Perhaps it is a bit too narrow or mathematical in its scope
and fails to refer to closely related spellings in its
cross-reference scheme. At least I'd expected to find something
under "merr", which I'd think would be quite a common word.
But I can't find 'marhs' in Streitberg's Wörterbuch either.
So maybe that is the reason.

Another interesting point is that the lists at the back of Lehman's book
might be used to obtain a numerical measure of how closely a given
language is related to Gothic. For example a language such Armenian,
has only 318 words that are etymologically related to Gothic,
whereas Old High German has around 3300, i.e. around 10 times as many.
Clearly Gothic is much more closely related to Old High German than
to Armenian. But why, counting the words in the Low German word list
in the same way, Gothic would be more closely related to High German
than to Low German, I do not understand. (LG has only 14 pages of words,
whereas OHG has 18)

Keth



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